Over the years, I’ve spilled a lot of proverbial ink writing and talking about books. Since I’m a bookseller, much of that is composition about books’ content or condition. But I’ve also been inclined to express – sometimes at length – a non-sectarian reverence for books. Books as physical objects that encapsulate intellect and insight, aesthetic and ambition, time and tide. Books for what they represent as much as for what they are. Sometimes I even indulge in reading books that share my reverence. And sometimes, as a writer, I’m forced to bow in deference to someone who expresses my thoughts better than I’ve expressed them myself.
So it was when I was reading the Epilogue of a most unexpectedly excellent book called The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives by Adam Smyth (Basic Books, New York, 2024). With this post, my words are only intended to preface and present a few of his. A caveat: this is not a review of this compellingly interesting book. Rather, I’ll just share some of what I found in the last 17 pages.
So here goes.
On the subject of stewardship, rather than ownership of books, Symth speaks of “the poverty of singular claims to ownership: books move on, passing out of one owner’s clutches – however possessive those clutches might be – and moving on to meet the next generation. In this sense, the book always exceeds us, and the best we can do is feel it pass through our hands.”
On the book as an object that transcends the information it conveys, Smyth writes “Books are themselves incredible objects whose beauty and complexity enriches the text being read. Peer closely at calligrapher Edward Johnson’s curling green ‘W’ at the start of the Doves Press Hamlet, or the crystal-clear, immaculately spaced lettering of John Baskerville’s Paradise Lost. These are works of art that contribute to the meaning of the whole.”
On the connection between a book and its maker, between its present physical reality and the past from whence it came to us, Smyth writes “Books are expressive objects which themselves possess an emotional range and which convey, in their material forms, in ways that are sometimes legible, the texture of what it meant for a particular bookmaker to be alive.”
Of the future of the physical book, Smyth asserts “…this isn’t the end of anything – least of all the book – because a physical book is a different proposition to an electronic text. Print and digital need not be placed in an antagonistic relation to one another. The question ‘Will the book endure?’ or ‘Is the book dead?’ or ‘Will the internet kill the book?’ is mistaken because the five and a half centuries since Gutenberg show the book to be a form that has continually adapted to new people, ideas, contexts, and technologies, while all the time maintaining its identity as a physical support for text.”
This is a lot of rarefied sentiment, to be sure. Smyth does not neglect the mechanical, technical, logistical, and even financial considerations of book-makers in his work, but he does beautifully interleave the practicalities and potentialities, exalting the latter all the better for comprehending the former. Perhaps the best example is the final paragraphs of his Epilogue, where Smyth quotes Whitman the poet writing lyrically as Whitman the book-maker. It turns out that “Whitman was a printer and a typesetter on Long Island, New York, long before his poetry collection Leaves of Grass…” Smythe quotes Whitman’s six-line poem “A Font of Type”. Smyth writes “Type, Whitman wrote elsewhere, ‘rejects nothing’. Type represents possibility… The tidy font of type – and we can widen the category of ‘type’ to include all the materials of book-making – is potentiality itself: a way of bringing as yet ‘unlaunch’d voices’ into the world.”
Yes, I recommend The Book. By which I mean all of them, Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers included.
On the morning of Monday the 26th of August, my daughter moved into her new dorm room at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Later that afternoon, we said goodbye and parents were ushered off of the campus and sent home so that their progeny could settle into their new life as college students. I spent a lot of the day looking upwards. Perhaps that’s because the late summer cloudscapes of coastal Maine are breathtaking and the trees are stately and tall. It might also be because when you look up, your eyes are less likely to leak and your daughter is less likely to notice that you are trying to prevent your eyes from leaking. Allergies, I’m sure, from all that exotic Maine pollen.
Anyway, there I was, at the Northwest corner of my daughter’s dorm building, hands on hips and looking up from her first-floor window, through which I had seen her unpacking and settling in. I could feel my eyes starting to water – you know, because of the pollen – so I looked up. There appeared to be an anomaly in the otherwise regular pattern of brick exterior interspersed with windows. A stone plaque was set into the wall below the window sill two floors directly above my daughter’s own. Once my eyes cleared (damned pollen) I could read what it said:
COLLEGE ROOM OF
LONGFELLOW
1823-1825
Assuming this was not just an extravagantly permanent homage to the physical endowments of a former student, my daughter now resides in the same corner of the same dorm occupied two hundred years ago by the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Looking up at Longfellow’s dorm room window, I remembered an early Second World War exchange between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston S. Churchill involving Longfellow.
When Churchill became Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, the war for Britain was not so much a struggle for victory as a struggle to survive. Churchill’s first year in office saw, among other near-calamities, the Battle of the Atlantic, the fall of France, evacuation at Dunkirk, and the Battle of Britain. Hitler intended the massive, sustained attacks by his Luftwaffe to achieve air superiority preparatory to an invasion of England. Sapping Britain’s Air Force and war-making capacity was of course a goal. But so too was the simple goal of terrorizing Britons and eroding their will to fight. As the year 1941 began, Churchill’s Britain had held on with remarkable resolve and resourcefulness, but her position remained tenuous. The United States would not formally enter the war until the end of the year, after the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the brutal interval, the Lend-Lease Act gave Britain both vital material aid and an equally vital expression of support. On Saturday, 8 February 1941, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Lend-Lease Bill by 260 to 165 Votes. It had yet to pass the Senate and be signed by President Roosevelt, but a major hurdle absolutely crucial to the British had been passed. Churchill’s broadcast address to Britain and the Empire the next day, 9 February, was his first broadcast for five months. He was well aware that a significant element of his audience was American public opinion. Near the end of his remarks, Churchill quoted verse from a Longfellow poem which President Roosevelt had written out in his own hand and sent to Churchill on January 27:
“Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate.”
Churchill concluded his 9 February broadcast with his answer to President Roosevelt: “Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing, and under Providence all will be well. We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.”
The United States enacted the Lend Lease Act in early March and soon thereafter extended its naval security zone several thousand miles into the Atlantic, effectively shielding much of the Atlantic convoy route.
The Lend-Lease Act was a clever, calculated, steely-eyed political balancing act. Roosevelt managed to provide essential aid to a stalwart future ally without yet overtly committing to war his nation, which was not yet committed to war. While Lend-Lease was a political masterstroke, it was hardly the stuff of rhapsodizing poetry. Why would Roosevelt send Churchill lines of verse – and in his own hand at that?
Perhaps because Roosevelt knew what the poet Mary Oliver later said of poetry – that a poem is not ‘wordplay’ but “something beyond language devices” with “a purpose other than itself… poems are not words… but fires for the cold, ropes to let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”
Perhaps poets and poetry have always been, and always will be, more praised than read. But I’m reminded of another story, one closer to our own time. When the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney died in 2013, his funeral was widely attended by the good and great. But the tribute I found most affecting was the one given by football fans. A crowd of 80,000 in a Gaelic football stadium observed a full minute’s silence and then burst into applause in Heaney’s honor during a match between Dublin and Kerry.
Mary Oliver was a poet. It was no accident that she referred to “bread in the pockets of the hungry” rather than in the bellies of the hungry. We carry poetry with us, both culturally and personally, because what poetry can provide at need – encompassing perspective, edifying purpose, steadying reassurance and hope. These are fire, rope, and bread. These are necessities.
You may browse our current inventory of poetry HERE.
Yes, that’s a hell of a pretentious title. Or magnificently idealistic, depending on your perspective.
By happenstance, we recently acquired three works from three First World War leaders – all first-hand accounts of the ultimately ill-fated ideals threading the peace treaty that ended the First World War and the formation of the League of Nations. Both were intended to prevent a Second World War, the one that began only 20 years after the First.
Woodrow Wilson and The Hope of the World
This little book – quite uncommon in the dust jacket – chronicles the failed advocacy of President Woodrow Wilson, at the end of the First World War, to persuade the United States to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and join the embryonic League of Nations. It contains “Messages and Addresses delivered by the President between July 9, 1919 and December 9, 1919”.
Before the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, President Wilson had sought to keep America out of the “European war” and “appealed to American citizens to ‘act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of impartiality.’” Yet even before a reluctant United States formally joined the war, President Woodrow Wilson pursued the idea of a League of Nations. “On 27 May 1916 the president announced his vision of collective security… calling for a new global community of democratic nations to preserve world peace and protect universal human rights.” Wilson anticipated that “a postwar League of Nations, … would replace Europe’s discredited balance of power and old alliances. ‘There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.’ This was his vision of a new ‘covenant’ among ‘democratic nations.’” At the Paris Peace Conference that convened in January 1919 at Versailles, Wilson “made drafting the covenant for this new international organization his top priority and insisted on its inclusion in the peace treaty.”
But while Wilson had an international constituency, he lacked a critical domestic one. “On his return home, Wilson presented the treaty to the U.S. Senate. Wilson’s 10 July 1919 speech presenting the Peace Treaty and League of Nations to the United States Senate for ratification is the first address in this volume: “We entered the war as the disinterested champions of right, and we interested ourselves in the terms of the peace in no other capacity”. He asserted “it was not easy to graft the new order of ideas on the old.” Wilson called the League of Nations “not merely an instrument to adjust and remedy old wrongs under a new treaty of peace”; it was, he said, the “only hope for mankind.”
The U.S. Senate, and particularly Henry Cabot Lodge, leader of the Republican majority, opposed Wilson and ratification. In the face of Senate opposition, “Wilson… decided to appeal directly to the American people and in September 1919 went on a speaking tour of western states.” However, Wilson “failed to mobilize public opinion effectively against Lodge and the Republican-controlled Senate. During the western tour, Wilson’s health collapsed. On 2 October 1919, back in Washington, he suffered a massive stroke.” With Wilson’s health, hope of U.S. participation also collapsed. “The Senate rejected the treaty on 19 November 1919 and again on 19 March 1920, thereby preventing the United States from joining the League of Nations – a critical absence that crippled the organization from its inception.
“A Practical Suggestion” from Jan Smuts
We were thrilled to recently acquire this copy of legendary South African and Commonwealth leader Jan Smuts’s book on the post-First World War Peace – thrilled because this copy was inscribed by Smuts in Paris in 1919.
Renowned South African soldier and statesman Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950) served as both the 2nd (1919-1924) and 4th (1939-1948) Prime Minister of South Africa. He was an important figure in world politics, serving in the British War Cabinet in both the First and Second World Wars, and having a hand in the formation of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. Smuts was the only person to sign the peace treaties ending both the First and Second World Wars, and was the only person to sign the charters of both the League of Nations and of the United Nations. With respect to the former, “he may justly be called one of the principal progenitors of the League of Nations.”
During the First World War, “In the midst of his public duties, Smuts also re-established his ties with his Quaker, Liberal, and radical feminist friends… They… undoubtedly strengthened his liberal internationalism…. After armistice he was responsible for the demobilization plans of all the British departments and for compiling the British brief for the peace conference… Smuts’s experience of the South African War and the influence of his radical and pacifist friends deeply informed his opposition to the idea of total war, or indeed total surrender, and his keen advocacy of a new international order, embodied in his pamphlet The League of Nations, a Practical Suggestion… At the Paris peace conference, where with Botha he represented South Africa, Smuts continued to argue in vain for a magnanimous peace; he despaired that the Versailles treaty was ‘conceived on a wrong basis that… will prove utterly unstable and only serve to promote the anarchy which is rapidly overtaking Europe.’ He even threatened to resign as a delegate and lead a campaign against the treaty as ‘an abomination’… Nevertheless, when Lloyd George asked pointedly whether he was prepared to return the German colonies in south-west or east Africa, Smuts equivocated – and signed the treaty.” (ODNB)
In his work and in this book, Smuts had advocated that the nascent League of Nations “occupy the great position which has been rendered vacant by the destruction of so many of the old European Empires and the passing away of the old European order.” Smuts wanted the League to “be put in the very forefront of the programme of the Peace Conference and made the point of departure for the solution of so many of the grave problems with which it will be confronted.” Smuts’s vision was not realized. The failures of the post-World War I peace and the inadequacies of a League of Nations far more limited than Smuts had advocated helped precipitate the Second World War two decades after Smuts wrote this book. Smuts was destined to play an even greater role in that war and, in the wake of it, in the formation of the more robust and enduring institution of the United Nations.
David Lloyd George – a purpose rooted in “the present as much as the past”
The final work prompting this post is, like the two above, about the First World War settlement. But unlike the two works above, it was written on the eve of the Second World War.
This is a two-volume, first edition, first printing set of David Lloyd Goerge’s memoirs of the peace conference that ended the First World War. As British Prime Minister from 1916-1922, Lloyd George was a principal architect of the conference and peace. This set captured our attention for its exceptional condition, still housed in the original publisher’s slipcase and retaining most of the original glassine dust wrappers. But the set is even more noteworthy for timing than for condition. It is no accident that Lloyd George was publishing his memoirs of the peace settlement that ended the First World War in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War. The extensive blurb on the slipcase concludes “an account by one of the three men who directed it of the entire bewildered drama that still has its echoes in the Europe of 1939.”
These two volumes were widely regarded as “the continuation and conclusion” to Lloyd George’s Memoirs of the First World War, published in six volumes between 1933 and 1936. In those six volumes, David Lloyd George was not just continuing, amid the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich, to “debate on the strategy and ethics of the First World War.” He was “also implicitly arguing the case for a totally different approach towards Germany and international affairs in the 1930s. Their purpose was the present as much as the past.”
The same can be said of Memoirs of the Peace Conference. From 1936 on, “Lloyd George’s main preoccupation now was trying to reverse the effects of Versailles… As Germany fell into totalitarian dictatorship under Hitler, Lloyd George renewed his attacks on the reparations and unjust frontiers imposed on the defeated Germans. He was critical of the league and the failure to disarm as laid down in the peace treaties, and highly censorious of the French.” All of this was perhaps quite reasonable, but it was a time of great errors in judgement and Lloyd George was not immune. Lloyd George visited Hitler. Thereafter he wrote ecstatically of Hitler as ‘the greatest living German’, ‘the George Washington of Germany’ (Daily Express, 17 Sept 1936). It was a serious miscalculation… and did him much harm.” Nonetheless, “Right down to September 1939 he was a major political player.” Lloyd George “made one last great Commons speech, on 8 May 1940, when his devastating attack on Neville Chamberlain helped to bring the prime minister down and led to the succession of Winston Churchill.”
The presence of the past
The world learned at least something from the failures of the post-First World War peace. Although the world is riven with lesser conflicts, there have been no conflicts as internationally encompassing and devastatingly destructive as a world war for 80 years – four times the interval between the First and Second World Wars. The United Nations, successor institution to the League of Nations, has seen far more expansive international participation, and taken on broader and more robust roles in international affairs.
But the binding cords of international accord visibly fray. Disarmament treaties expire without being replaced. Longstanding treaties promising mutual aid among democratic nations falter or fray. Alliances among aggressor nations strengthen. International trade norms and rules are likewise flouted or dismantled. Efforts at new, multi-lateral trade agreements fall short of their potential as the United States suffers radical political oscillations and flirts with protectionism and isolationism. International courts issue indictments and warrants for wantonly belligerent heads of state, who shrug them with impunity. Freedom of speech and of the press and even citizen preference for, and confidence in, self-government precipitously declines.
When institutions and norms and values and even good will fail, there is history. To remind us that hope is the responsibility of each successive generation. That each generation is burdened with imperfection, ugly compromise, and failure. That relentless effort to achieve a comprehending awareness is not an esoteric intellectual pursuit, but a necessary foundation for constructively engaging and shaping the world. That books remind us. They fill shelves and rooms and whole libraries with the weight of what we have thought and tried. All so that we might remember and understand and, perhaps, be able to do better when we try again.
For those of you unfamiliar with polemic German, that translates “Churchill the World Liar.” This subtle and gently nuanced critique, below an unflattering original caricature of Winston S. Churchill appears to have been inked by a German soldier on 3 October, just a month after the Second World War began. This ostensibly unique, hand-drawn poster survived nearly five years of war before it was recovered from captured German barracks by an Allied solder.
The piece measures 12.25 x 8.5 inches (31.1 x 21.6 cm). The drawing features a slightly demonically-rendered countenance of Winston S. Churchill wearing a hat high on his head, cocked to the right with a stylized, gloved hand clawing around the brim. Churchill’s eyes are slightly asymmetrical and horizontally elongated, the roundness of his face slightly and unflatteringly exaggerated, his mouth open. The net effect is oddly evocative of an inebriated, rotund, clumsily malign and yet simultaneously ridiculous German burgher. The drawing, measuring 4.5 x 3.5 inches (11.4 x 8.9 cm) and framed by two border rules, occupies the upper center of the paper below a prominent, underscored title labeling the image “Unser Feind!” (“Our Enemy!”). Lightning-shaped arrows originating from the underscoring beneath the title point unsubtly to either side of the image – just in case the identity of the subject “Unser Feind” is in question. Centered directly below Churchill’s image are two further lines: “Churchill, | der Weltlugner”. (“Churchill, the World Liar”). At the lower right corner, just inside of a single border rule, the image is dated “8 Okt. 1939” and signed by the artist. The signature is indecipherable.
Condition is very good, particularly given the age and wartime experience of the piece. There are pin holes at the corners, a small hole in the second “h” of Churchill’s name, and a small vertical hole, wider at the center and pointed at the ends, in Churchill’s upper right forehead; it requires little imagination to perceive the shape of this hole as consonant with a knife point. There are five small circular stains adjacent to the upper and lower vertical center, some light spotting to the blank lower portion of the drawing, light overall soiling, the soiling heavier to the upper verso, where we also note a small paperclip rust stain.
Clues to provenance are tantalizing. 3 October, when this piece was drawn and signed, was an optimistic day for the Wehrmacht; on this day in 1939, French forces completed their withdrawal from advanced positions in German territory and the last significant units of the Polish army surrendered, allowing German forces to begin redeploying from Poland to western Europe. Two days prior, on 1 October, Churchill, then still First Lord of the Admiralty, made his first wartime radio broadcast.
Of course Churchill was not yet wartime Prime Minister and the stern rhetoric that characterized his wartime speeches was perhaps somewhat tempered. Even so, any German solder listening would have rightly regarded Churchill as “Our Enemy!” Even as Britain’s allies were falling with shocking speed, Churchill spoke of resistance, resolve, and implacable opposition to Germany’s ascendant Fuhrer. Churchill told the British people to “…prepare for a war of at least years. That does not mean that victory may not be gained in a short time. How soon it will be gained depends upon how long Herr Hitler and his group of wicked men, whose hands are stained with blood and soiled with corruption, can keep their grip upon the docile unhappy German people. It was for Hitler to say when the war would begin, but it is not for him or his successor to say when it will end. It began when he wanted it, and it will end only when we are convinced that he has had enough.”
We do not know what befell the artist who created this poster, or the soldiers who had it in their barracks four years, eleven months, and fifteen days after it was signed and dated. Nonetheless, we can be sure that the world and the war looked much different to Germany and her soldiers than it had on 3 October 1939.
At the upper left of the poster’s verso is a dated notation in pencil in four lines: “18 Sept 44 | The Jerries left this | behind at their now our | barracks.” Below and in a different hand, also in pencil, is a translation of the poster “Our enemy | the world liar”. Pin holes at the center of circular thumbtack indentations at each corner make it seem more than probable that this poster was displayed informally. Perhaps that is how it was discovered by the presumed allied soldier who made the notation on the back of the poster. The term “Jerry” to refer to the Germans was used generally by Allied soldiers and civilians, but originated with, and was most used by, the British. We cannot be sure of exactly where or by whom this poster was found, but in the European theater in mid-September 1944, Operation ‘Market Garden’ – involving one of the largest airborne operations in history – was underway. On Monday, 18 September 1944, British ground troops linked with U.S. 101st Airborne Division in Eindhoven, Holland.
The juxtaposition of the sentiments with which this unique artifact was drawn at the beginning of the war, and the manner in which it was discovered and claimed almost five years later, limn the brutal arc from the heady initial blitzkrieg of German ascendance to imminent, ignominious, and utter defeat.
This piece was once part of the extraordinary collection of Philip David Sang (1902-1975). Sang donated manuscript collections to Brandeis University, Yale University, the Illinois State Historical Museum and to Southern Illinois University, among others. He also loaned items from his vast collection to many museums and libraries for historical exhibits. Following his death, his widow, Elsie Olin Sang, sold many of his remaining manuscript and archival collections. This piece thus made its way to a colleague in the book trade, who held it for a number of years before conveying it to us.
As for the subject of this caricature, the artist hardly needed to go to the trouble of identifying his subject as “Churchill”. Prolific and almost instantly recognizable caricature would characterize most of Winston Churchill’s long life. Years before this particular caricature was drawn, Churchill said “cartoons are the regular food on which the grown-up children of to-day are fed and nourished. On these very often they form their views of public men and public affairs; on these very often they vote… But how… would you like to be cartooned yourself? How would you like to feel that millions of people saw you always in the most ridiculous situations, or portrayed as every kind of wretched animal, or with a nose on your face like a wart, when really your nose is quite a serviceable and presentable member? How would you like to feel that millions of people think of you like that? – that shocking object, that contemptible being, that wretched tatterdemalion, a proper target of public hatred and derision! Fancy having that process going on every week, often every day, over the whole of your life… But it is not so bad as you would expect. Just as eels are supposed to get used to skinning, so politicians get used to being caricatured. In fact, by a strange trait in human nature they even get to like it. If we must confess it, they are quite offended and downcast when the cartoons stop…” (Thoughts and Adventures, 1932) So recognizable did Churchill become that for his final political campaign in 1959 his poster was a simple, solid blue profile of his instantly recognizable countenance, with the inevitable cigar protruding – the alleged Weltlugner become instead a Weltfuhrer.
Robert Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon (1897-1977) famously resigned his Foreign Secretary post in the British Cabinet on 20 February 1938 in protest of the Government’s appeasement policies. “Although Eden had resigned over the appeasement of Italy rather than Germany, there was no doubt that he was also frustrated and irritated by the pro-Germans in Chamberlain’s Cabinet…” (Roberts, Walking with Destiny, p.423)
Like his fellow anti-appeaser, Winston Churchill, Eden was out of step with both his Party leadership and prevailing public sentiment in his assertion of the imperative to rearm and to resist the rise of European fascism. But unlike Churchill, Eden was not already in political exile, instead risking his career with his resignation. The following year, in a Strand Magazine profile of the once and future Foreign Minister, Churchill praised Eden for his “readiness to sacrifice unhesitatingly his great position for the sake of his convictions … even the most hostile critic must recognize the strong fibre of his nature, and the resolute purpose of his mind.”
A decade later, Churchill recalled receiving a phone call late in the night of February 20 “as I sat in my old room at Chartwell… that Eden had resigned. I must confess that my heart sank, and for a while the dark waters of despair overwhelmed me… During all the war soon to come and in its darkest times I never had any trouble in sleeping… But now, on this night of February 20, 1938, and on this occasion only, sleep deserted me. From midnight till dawn I lay in my bed consumed by emotions of sorrow and fear. There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses. My conduct of affairs would have been different from his in various ways; but he seemed to me at this moment to embody the life-hope of the British nation… Now he was gone. I watched the daylight slowly creep in through the windows and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death.” (The Gathering Storm, pp. 257-8)
A Marvelous Artifact
We were recently reminded of this pivotal pre-Second World War moment by a marvelous artifact of the moment. This exceptionally rare volume from the first month of the Second World War is the privately printed, finely bound, limited, and hand-numbered edition of future British Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s 26 April 1938 “England” address. This anti-appeasement speech was given at the Festival Banquet of the Royal Society of St. George just two months after Eden’s resignation. Not only is it one of just twelve copies, but it is also compellingly inscribed by Eden during the Second World War and further accompanied by a wartime autograph presentation letter signed by Eden’s foreign office secretary.
Edition and Condition
The edition is hand-numbered “5” of only twelve copies. Per the Colophon: “This speech was printed privately, in hand-set Centaur type on hand-made paper, by Peter Harvey, at Coed y Maen in the County of Montgomery. It was completed in September 1939, and bound by Nesta Williams Wynn. This edition is limited to twelve copies, of which this is number 5.” The limitation number is hand-written in black.
The binding is full orange Morocco goatskin with raised, blind-rule framed spine bands. The sumptuous paper on which the contents are printed is water-marked and bound with untrimmed edges and decorative endpapers.
As lovely and rare as it is, what renders this item most compelling – not to mention truly unique – is the inscription and presentation letter.
Inscription and Presentation
Eden’s inscription is inked on the recto of a preliminary blank in 11 lines:
“To Paul | who was one of the first to see that | “The danger signals are up in many colours | and in many lands”, | in recollection of much | stress of mind and toil | endured together in abortive | attempts to awaken the appeasers, | from | Anthony | November 1942”.
The recipient, Paul Vychan Emrys-Evans (1894-1964), was “Educated at Harrow and King’s College, Cambridge. During the First World War, he served as a lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment (1914-17) and was wounded in France in 1916. He worked for the Foreign Office from 1917-23 and was later a Conservative MP for South Derbyshire from 1931-45. He was Parliamentary Private Secretary successively at the War Office and Dominion Affairs in 1940-41 and thereafter, from 1941-45, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs. (Gilbert, V, p.903)
Laid in is an autograph note signed on Foreign Office stationery from Foreign Office secretary Valentine Lawford dated “Nov 23rd 1942”. The note reads “Dear Emrys-Evans, The Secretary of State has now inscribed your copy of Peter Harvey’s Edition of his speech on England; and I return it, herewith. Yours sincerely, V. Lawford”
The secretarial letter is written and signed by Valentine Lawford (1911-1991), who entered the diplomatic service in 1934 and was assistant private secretary successively to Lord Halifax, Anthony Eden, and Ernest Bevin. He attended the Moscow, Quebec, and Yalta conferences and was appointed to the United Kingdom delegation to the United Nations in 1946, leaving service in 1950.
The Speech
It is difficult to imagine a more quintessentially English venue for Eden’s speech. “The Royal Society of St. George was founded in 1894 with the noble object of promoting ‘Englishness’ and the English way of life.” Eden’s speech was an eloquent effort to connect Englishness to the imperative of resisting fascism at a time when both his government and prevailing public sentiment were still substantially pro-appeasement.
In his speech, Eden praises England’s greatest bequeathal as “the art of self-government by a free people.” Eden’s speech is relatively short, but almost Churchillian in its invocation of social, political, and historical perspective in order to provide validating contextualization for a resolute course of action. In Eden’s case, the cause is preservation of constructive democracy and the need to arm and, if necessary, be prepared to resist, the belligerent aggressiveness of rising European autocracies – namely Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany.
“For us” Eden asserts “freedom is a condition of true international understanding. There can be no lasting peace without freedom.” This Eden asserts as the foundation of an anti-appeasement argument. After touching upon the horrors of the First World War – in which he notes he was a combatant – Eden sets the desire and expectation of “old ways of life with the old security” against the fact of living in a period when society “has rushed forward at a pace which could not be checked or controlled.” Eden speaks of the difficulties of democracy, which can degenerate “rapidly into licence… or repressive restrictions upon liberty” as soon it is deviates “from the narrow path too far either to the left or to the right… either of which inevitably leads to tyranny.”
Echoing an anti-appeasement clarion, Eden quotes Jan Smuts, former Prime Minister of South Africa (who would return to lead his country during the Second World War in September 1939, the very month this volume was published): “’The issue of freedom, the most fundamental issue of all our civilization, is once more squarely raised by what is happening in the world, and cannot be evaded. The danger signals are up in many colours and in many lands.’” It is this line which Eden quotes in his inscription to Emrys-Evans in this volume. Pointing out the rise, accomplishments, and appeal of autocracies, Eden asserts that “A united effort for the spiritual and material rearmament of the nation is the need of the hour.”
The Man
The rest of Eden’s career would be spent serving and succeeding Churchill. Eden would not remain long in the anti-appeasement wilderness, but would nonetheless endure a very long wait for his own opportunity to lead, which would prove both bitter and short when it came. Eden was destined to become one of the most eminent, qualified, and frustrated political lieutenants in British history before he finally became Prime Minister.
Educated at Eton and Christ Church Oxford, among his panoply of accomplishments, Eden served on the western front from 1915-1918 and was awarded the Military Cross. He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1923-1957. His posts included Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Foreign Office (1931-1933), Lord Privy Seal (1934-35), Minister for League of Nations Affairs (1935), and Foreign Secretary (1935-38, 1940-1945, and 1951-1955).
With Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, war came to Britain. “On 3 September, when war was declared, Eden accepted office in the National Government as dominions secretary. Churchill returned to the Admiralty, but unlike Eden as a member of the war cabinet. Although Eden was disappointed with the division of the spoils, he regarded it as his patriotic duty to serve.”
When Churchill became wartime Prime Minister in May 1940, Eden returned to power and, in December, to the Foreign Office, where he remained until July 1945. In November 1942 – the same month Eden inscribed this book – Churchill also made Eden Leader of the House of Commons, “an almost insupportable burden in addition to his duties in the war cabinet, on the defence committee, and in running the Foreign Office.” (ODNB)
A reasonable expectation might have been that, when Churchill’s wartime coalition government fell in July 1945, Eden would succeed Churchill as Leader of the Opposition and eventually become the next Prime Minister when the Conservatives returned to majority. But such were Churchill’s stature and inclinations that Eden was not given the reins until Churchill resigned his second and final premiership in April 1955.
Eden’s long-delayed premiership proved both brief and fraught with challenge, including the Suez Crisis, and showed Eden prone to reveal “irascibility, his inability at times to delegate, and his touchiness in the face of criticism.” Nonetheless, the passage of time sees Eden “increasingly recognized as a serious and patriotic figure who worked under the most appalling pressure for nearly three decades at the front line of British and world politics.” (ODNB) Eden was appointed a Knight of the Garter in 1954 and created 1st Earl of Avon in 1961. Many honors accrued to Eden, and he was an active chancellor of Birmingham University for nearly three decades.
Recently, I went to a record store with my teenage daughter, where she showed shiny-eyed reverence for old vinyl records – objects that I would have been unable to unload at a garage sale just a few decades ago. I pointed out that she has a subscription to multiple music platforms, each with enormous, on-demand song catalogues that stream with high fidelity through the device of her choice. I pointed out the aesthetic and practical inefficiencies of spinning a frisbee under a needle as a means to consume music, not to mention the silliness of filling shelves with heavy, fragile vinyl discs. Then, I remembered how many bookshelves we have in our house. And, yes, I bought her some vinyl records. Let’s acknowledge that there is much about book collecting that makes no sense.
While I’m at it, I’ll also acknowledge that, at the end of the year I tend to get a bit reflective. Hence this post, which revisits and connects a number of perspectives I’ve shared over the years and also shared in our new 2024 catalogue. (Click HERE or on the adjacent image to view the catalogue.)
But I was talking about book collecting and how it makes no sense. So back to it.
Author Nicholas Basbanes wrote a lovely book about the afflicted, aptly titled A Gentle Madness. That title derived from an affectionate description of Isaiah Thomas, the Revolutionary War-era printer, publisher, and author who founded (and contributed his entire, considerable personal library to) the American Antiquarian Society – a still-extant repository for printed records of the United States. Isaiah Thomas was eulogized by his grandson as “touched early by the gentlest of infirmities, bibliomania.”
What was “mania” then is certainly no less now, in our age of almost instantaneously available and nearly infinitely portable information. Sorry Alexandria – one can now carry a literal library on a phone. So why fill shelves with books?
Books are a tenuous combination of perishable materials and discordant chemistry – various types of ink and paper, glue and string and cloth, materials that may be animal, vegetable, synthetic, or all three. The constituent elements of books court entropy and conspire to decohere almost from the moment they are bound together. For the vast majority of books, their purpose is fulfilled in being read and wrecked.
But a very few live a different life. Collectible books transmogrify, becoming something precious, a lingering signal amid the static, objects with a greater purpose than their consumption. And, often, the longer they endure, the better they are regarded.
Here’s something even less sensible. One may pay lots of money for rare or collectible books. But one shouldn’t own them.
That’s right. This bookseller is telling you that you shouldn’t own what you buy.
OK – a clarification so we don’t hear from an attorney… We encourage you not to regard your collectible books as if you own them. We respectfully suggest that your job as a discerning collector is to make sure your collection outlives you and your custody thereof. Relish, of course. Covet, obsess, and even, if you must, brag a little. But foremost, serve as a diligent and conscientious custodian. Take care to preserve what is in your custody. And make sensible provisions to ensure that your charges find a successor custodian with commitment and sensibility equal to your own. Your job is to ensure that what comes into your possession eventually passes from your hands to the next with as much defiance of age and injury as possible.
Why? This is a reasonable question to ask given the assertions above.
Many answers occur. Just to keep things interesting, here’s an answer from a book about… falconry:
“I once asked my friends if they ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with 3,000 year old thumbprints in the clay said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from World War II. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate. They gave them the sense as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. “You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there” one friend told me. “It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them somehow.” History collapses…”
(from H is for Hawk byHelen Macdonald)
Nested within a greater dialogue of what it means to heed and hold a hawk is this rather lovely explanation of why one might wish to have and hold a book. Ms. Macdonald’s passage is an explanation of what a mere thing can convey. In certain books there is a sense of connection embodied in the physical object that exists simultaneous with, yet apart from, the words therein. For some of us, a book can be a small miracle of ephemeral, sentient alignment that we are compelled to conserve. Stewardship of these items is not mere collecting, but an act of safeguarding fragments of our collective, evolving humanity.
Yes, there is a market for rare books. And that market is just as ancient, enduring, and capriciously evolving as the learnings, loves, and lusts that drive us to possess books. But there is also something beyond mere collecting and commerce.
Among and between the pages and stacks and libraries and those who tend them, there is a conversation – a ranging, intermittent, and only vaguely coherent, but nonetheless constant conversation about the conceptions and expressions of who we are and who we hope to be as a species. As the books and ideas therein age and stratify, so too does the conversation. It becomes a susurration, a sort of quiet cultural undercurrent, consistently masked by the prevailing daily tides and wind and weather. But that doesn’t mean the conversational current is either irrelevant or unnecessary. Want of it, one feels, would still the great ocean of our experience, losing it by failing to gently stir its depths while the majority of our energy is always focused on disturbing the surface.
May you be afflicted with “the gentlest of infirmities” and an abundance of shelves.
We recently had the good fortune to acquire a worn but complete and fully intact ex-library set of the 1900 first edition, second printing of Winston Churchill’s The River War. This is Churchill’s second published work, the lengthiest from his time as an itinerant cavalry officer and war correspondent during the waning days of Queen Victoria’s reign.
Perhaps – understandably – this does not elicit a collector’s “Wow!” Second printing. Worn. And ex-library? But before you turn up your nose, maybe you should ask which library. This particular set was acquired within months of publication by the Robben Island Public Library, on 9 July 1900.
Tiny, 2 square mile (just over 5 square kilometers) Robben Island, off of South Africa’s western cape, began use as a place of imprisonment or exile in the mid-1600s, but gained worldwide fame as the prison that held Nelson Mandela for 18 of the 27 years of his imprisonment. During the second half of the twentieth century, Robben Island was used by the South African government as a prison for political prisoners and convicted criminals. It ceased to be used as a prison in the mid-1990s, concurrent with the fall of Apartheid and during the inaugural presidency of Nelson Mandela under a multi-racial South African democracy. South Africa declared the Island a National Monument in 1996 and the island was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999.
Provenance of this set is unequivocal, the oval stamps of “Robben Island Public Library”, most featuring the stamped “9 JUL 00” date of accession and one, on each title page, inked by hand “D.1./00.” Dated accession stamps are found on the Volume I half title, frontispiece recto and verso, title page, first Contents page, first page of text, p.166 portrait, and each of the maps. Dated accession stamps are found on the Volume II initial blank recto, half title, frontispiece recto and verso, title page, all maps, p.270 portrait, and p.301.
There is one further bit of provenance within the set. Each lower front pastedown features the tiny, gilt-printed sticker of “T. Maskew Miller, | Bookseller, Publisher and Stationer | Cape Town & Bulawayo”. Miller (1863-1930) established his eponymous business in Cape Town in 1893, initially importing books and stationery, later expanding into publishing. His Bulawayo branch was established in 1897. It seems virtually certain that Miller originally supplied these books to Robben Island’s Library.
There are no external library marks, no card pockets or chronicle of use, and no deaccession markings. This is consonant with the fact that the library was surely a modest affair. According to the Robben Island Museum, the Robben Island Library dates from the early 1890s, during which time the island was being used to quarantine lepers and “a library was opened in a ward formerly used for the chronic sick.” The Museum states that the small population of Robben Island still supported a library in the 1920s.
Of course, any speculation regarding whether this set was ever read by Mandela is so unsubstantiated as to be fanciful. But we do know that Mandela was a voracious reader and can certainly speculate that this “tale of blood and war” and colonial subjugation of Africa would have fallen within the scope of his literary appetite. Moreover, we know that Churchill was an affecting presence during Mandela’s time at Robbin Island (1964-1982). Mandela recounted, in the late 1960s, having passages of Churchill’s wartime speeches recited to him and his fellow prisoners by an Anglican priest and, in the late 1970s, watching a documentary about the WWI sinking of Prince of Wales. Of the film, Mandela recalled: “What moved me most was a brief image of Winston Churchill weeping… The image stayed in my memory a long time, and demonstrated to me that there are times when a leader can show sorrow in public, and that it will not diminish him in the eyes of his people.” (Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom)
It requires no speculation to note the fascinating timing of this set. In October 1899, the second Boer War erupted between the descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa and the British. Churchill, an itinerant, adventure-seeking young cavalry officer and war correspondent, swiftly found himself in South Africa with the 21st Lancers and an assignment as press correspondent to the Morning Post. Not long thereafter, on 15 November 1899 – only 8 months before the “JUL 1900” accession date of this set – Churchill was captured during a Boer ambush of an armored train. His daring and dramatic escape less than a month later made him a celebrity and helped launch his political career.
Following his escape, “For the next six months, he encountered fire, took part in the bloody and unsuccessful battle of Spion Kop in January 1900 and, as the war turned in Britain’s favour, was present at the relief of Ladysmith and the occupation of Pretoria.” (ICS) The very month this set of books was stamped in the Robben Island Library – July 1900 – Churchill arrived back home in England from South Africa. Churchill spent the summer campaigning hard in Oldham, where he won his first seat in Parliament on 1 October 1900 in the so-called “khaki election” on the strength of his status as a hero of the war.
While their paths were incomparably disparate in most respects, it can be said of both Mandela and Churchill that their paths to the leadership of their respective nations passed through South African prisons.
Though Churchill’s escape proved swift and salutary, this particular artifact of Churchill-as-author served a longer sentence. We are fortunate that these books improbably survived their term on Robben Island to find us now, oceans and continents and a century and a quarter removed from their first home.
If you are an antiquarian bookseller, then no physical object is just an object. Each item we handle, however mundane it may physically appear, encapsulates, represents, preserves, or conveys something greater than just the sum of its physical attributes.
Take, for example, four old typed sheets, pasted on some blue notepaper. These humble sheets are a proverbial front row seat to one of the most gifted orators in recorded history and a physical artifact of the Second World War. They are also a connection not only to Winston Churchill in the early days of his wartime premiership, but also to a man who closely, long, and loyally served and observed Churchill.
The Object
These sheets are the final paragraphs of Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill’s 8 October 1940 speech to the British House of Commons, typed and hand-emended on four pages in Churchill’s distinctive ‘psalm form’, along with a manuscript note from Churchill’s Private Secretary, John Rupert “Jock” Colville, explaining the origin and use of these pages.
Four typed sheets are pasted on to the recto and verso of blue-ruled notepaper. In his own hand, filling the first six lines of an additional sheet of blue-ruled note paper, Colville provides both explanation and provenance: “The end of the P.M.’s speech in the House on Oct 8th. | These pages are flimsy copies of the actual text from which he | spoke and are those from which I checked and followed | the speech as it was delivered. | The P.M. also has them typed in this curious way – like | the Psalms, as Lord Halifax says!”
The “Tuesday, October 8th” entry in Colville’s diary, published many years later, refers to these very notes: “I followed the speech from a flimsy of the P.M.’s notes, which are typed in a way which Halifax says is like the printing of the psalms.” (The Fringes of Power, Downing Street Diaries 1939-1955, p.258)
Of course, Churchill’s speech has been reprinted many times in many volumes and can readily be read off not only myriad printed pages, but also off of any screen after a moment’s quick search of the internet. But you experience something entirely different when reading Churchill’s words thus, looking over Colville’s spectral shoulder, holding the same pages he held, and mouthing the words as you imagine listening to them as they were actually delivered by Churchill in the House of Commons on 8 October 1940.
Colville’s confirmation that Halifax coined the term for the layout of Churchill’s speeches (allegedly because it reminded the pious Halifax of lines from the Book of Psalms) is a delicious bit of irony. Halifax had been Neville Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary and an architect of the failed policy to appease Hitler. It was Halifax’s unwillingness to succeed Chamberlain that cleared the way for Churchill to become Prime Minister; Halifax instead became Churchill’s ambassador to America. Halifax’s “psalm” observation is no accident of liturgical linguistics; the church-going, fox-hunting, politically adept aristocrat was given the nickname “The Holy Fox” by none other than Churchill.
Churchill’s speeches were not only typed out in ‘psalm form’ but then “hole-punched with a tool Churchill called ‘Klop,’ named for the noise it made…” so that they could be “fastened with a… short piece of yarn with metal bars at each end, which allowed him to flop from sheet to sheet…” (Langworth, The Churchill Project)
The four sheets are hole-punched at the upper left. Consonant with Colville’s note that these pages “are those from which I checked and followed the speech as it was delivered”, there are two minor emendations.
Colville’s explanatory note shows loss and scarring along the right edge and a paperclip stain to the upper left. The typed speech sheets remain as originally glued to the note paper, with some attendant original wrinkling. They are marked in pencil at the upper right “E” and “F” respectively.
The Moment
On 8 October 1940, Britain and her Prime Minister were suffering the dire consequences of appeasement. The four pages of Churchill’s speech, comprising the final, two-paragraph peroration, encapsulate the state of Britain in October 1940, beleaguered, alone, and enduring the sustained air assault by Hitler’s Luftwaffe that would become known to history as the Battle of Britain.
The day Colville held these notes while he listened to his boss deliver the words in the House of Commons, he arrived for work at No. 10 Downing Street and “found everybody crouching in the shelter because bombs had fallen in the Horse Guards Parade and on the War Office.” There was no forgetting that London was under attack, even at comparative ease in the waning hours of the day. Colville recorded that in the evening, after the speech, Churchill “was in great form – as always after a speech has been successfully achieved – and amused [Anthony] Eden and me very much by his conversation with Nelson, the black cat, whom he chided for being afraid of the guns and unworthy of the name he bore. ‘Try and remember,’ he said to Nelson reprovingly, ‘what those boys in the R.A.F. are doing.” A year later, Colville would be one of “those boys in the R.A.F.” but that night he spent like the rest of his fellow Londoners, beneath the bombs, recording of his sleep “The air in the shelter went wrong in the middle of the night and I almost stifled.”
Churchill’ speech was long. He spoke of homes destroyed in the Blitz, and of personally visiting the destruction, showing his gift for encapsulating and projecting British resilience: “I have never been treated with so much kindness as by the people who have suffered most. One would think one had brought some great benefit to them, instead of the blood and tears, the toil and sweat which is all I have ever promised.” Churchill resisted calls for in-kind reprisals on Germany, insisting that only military targets should be attacked. Churchill also spoke of U.S. aid to Britain and addressed press criticism of Britain’s recent Dakar expedition.
He also spoke of Spain, which is where the four pages of Colville’s copy of Churchill’s speech notes begin. In his closing, Churchill strikes a characteristic tone – boldly defiant, lyrically inspiring, and soberly realistic all at once.
“Because we feel easier in ourselves
and see our way more clearly
through our difficulties and dangers
than we did some months ago;
because foreign countries,
friends orand foes,
recognise the giant,
enduring,
resilient strength
of Britan and the Br. Empire,
do not let us dull for one moment
the sense of the awful hazard
in which we stand.
Do not let us lose the conviction
tt it is only by supreme and
superb exertions,
unwearying, indomitable
tt we shall save our souls alive.
No-one can predict or even imagine
how this terrible war against
German and Nazi aggression
will run its course,
or how far it will spread,
or how long it will last.
Long dark months of trial and tribulation
lie before us.
Not only great dangers,
but many more misfortunes,
many shortcomings,
many mistakes,
many disappointments
will surely be our lot.
Death and sorrow will be the companions
of our journey,
hardship our garment;
constancy and valour are our
only shield.
We must be united;
we must be undaunted;
we must be inflexible.
Our qualities and our deeds
must burn and glow
through the gloom of Europe
till they become the veritable beacon of its salvation.”
Colville himself noted that this peroration “was eloquently spoken and enthusiastically received.”
Jock Colville
The Second World War was only a month old when, on 3 October 1939, a brilliant 24-year-old civil servant in the Foreign Office was appointed Assistant Private Secretary to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Seven months later, when wartime leadership famously passed to Winston Churchill, Sir John Rupert Colville (1915-1987) began working for Churchill. Colville would remain “almost constantly at Winston’s side” for the majority of Churchill’s two premierships (May 1940-July 1945 and October 1951-April 1955).
Colville’s 10 Downing Street service to Churchill was interrupted only by Colville’s active service as an RAF pilot between October 1941 and December 1943. Apart from Colville’s official contributions to history, we are obliged to him for his defiance; although it was forbidden under wartime regulations, Colville kept meticulous diaries that he locked nightly into his 10 Downing Street desk. Significant excerpts from this diary were eventually published in 1985, self-deprecatingly titled The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939-1955. Colville’s diaries continue, even now, to illuminate Churchill’s wartime leadership. Most recently, New York Times bestselling author Eric Larson relied heavily on Colville’s diaries in writing The Splendid and the Vile (2020), his novelized take on the first year of Churchill’s wartime Premiership.
Of course, Colville did more than observe and record. On 8 October 1940, after following the speech from these very notes, “John Peck and I corrected the official report and altered the text in many places to improve the style and the grammar; for the P.M.’s speeches are essentially oratorical masterpieces and in speaking he inserts much that sounds well and reads badly.”
Colville’s compulsive will to write, his position at the epicenter of action, Churchill’s deep confidence in him, and his keen and discerning intellect render Colville’s diaries a significant contribution to the known history of Churchill and his time. In the interwar years, Colville served as Private Secretary to Queen Elizabeth II (while she was still Princess Elizabeth) and married one of her ladies-in-waiting. Colville raised funds for the establishment of Churchill College, Cambridge (where his diaries now reside), and was eventually a trustee of both Winston’s and Lady Churchill’s estates.
Colville was knighted in 1974, having previously been awarded the Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in 1955, and the Companion of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) in 1949.
Florence Vivienne Entwistle, nee Mellish (1889-1982) first photographed Winston S. Churchill sometime between late December 1949 and early February 1950. Her journey to both photography and the Churchill family was intriguingly oblique.
She had trained and performed as a singer. Upon marriage to the artist Ernest Entwistle, she took up a successful career as a miniaturist. Her photographic career did not begin until 1934, when, midway through her forties, she began assisting her husband and son, Antony Beauchamp, with photography. When Antony set up his own studio, she did the same, adopting the name “Vivienne”, photographing an array of public personalities, including five successive prime ministers.
Vivienne’s relationship with the Churchills had a rocky start. On 18 October 1949, the Churchills’ daughter, Sarah, married Antony. Winston and Clementine “learned of the marriage… from the newspapers” and were “greatly upset… particularly Clementine, who took it very hard indeed.” Nonetheless, on 19 December 1949 Winston and Clementine visited Antony’s mother, Vivienne, in her studio and on 20 December Clementine wrote to Sarah “We have made friends with Antony’s father and mother and we had an agreeable luncheon together.” (Gilbert, Vol. VIII, p.496)
It was then, or very soon thereafter, that Vivienne made her best-known image of Winston Churchill. It may have been captured when Churchill first visited Vivienne’s studio in December 1949. Given that it was used in a campaign publication for the February 1950 General Election (see Cohen A247.2), it was taken no later than early 1950. We can also be certain that it was captured in Vivienne’s studio; Vivienne was known for requiring her subjects to come to her. Indeed, Vivienne’s autobiography is titled They Came to My Studio (1956) and this very image of Winston graces the dust jacket. Vivienne recalls (p.16) that this iconic and often reproduced image was the last of their photo session, the product of Churchill agreeing to give her “only one more minute” after he had already risen to go.
The relationship with the Churchills became familial. Vivienne “is possibly the only photographer to have had the privilege of photographing the entire Churchill family.” Vivienne eventually made exceptions to her in-studio rule for the Churchills. The National Portrait Gallery holds 214 of Vivienne’s portraits, including her most famous one of Winston (NPG x45168) and fourteen others of Winston, Clementine, and their grandchildren, the majority of which were taken at the Churchills’ country home, Chartwell.
We have the good fortune to currently offer three signed Vivienne portraits of the Churchills, all of which have a story to tell beyond just the general improbability of having been captured by the mother of the man who maritally absconded with their daughter.
Our first offering is a pair – one of Winston and one of Clementine – each signed, respectively by Winston and Clementine. Significantly, Winston’s print is not only signed, but dated in his hand “1950”.
The date is significant; widely used during his second and final premiership (1951-1955), this portrait is often mistakenly dated to 1951, even by the National Portrait Gallery. A date of “1950” in Churchill’s own hand rather decisively settles the issue. Of the image of Clementine (p.28), Vivienne recalls “I was proud when Lady Churchill came to me, because she so rarely consents to go to a studio. I believe she came – as she does so many things – for her husband’s sake.”
Our second offering is another Vivienne studio print of Churchill, but this one signed by both Churchill and Vivienne, and accompanied by a 17 November 1953 presentation letter signed by Churchill’s personal private secretary. This double-signed studio print was a gift to a collector upon the occasion of Churchill being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Notably, the fact that Churchill would receive the award had been announced only a month prior, on 13 October 1953, and the award ceremony did not take place until 10 December 1953. So this collector was demonstrably eager and swift in both requesting and receiving this signed photograph.
But, in our opinion, the accompanying presentation letter from Jane Portal suggests the more compelling story – one that renders the minor scandal of Sarah and Antony’s marriage quite tame by comparison.
Jane Williams nee Portal, Lady Williams of Elvel (1929-2023) “was the niece of both Air Chief Marshal Charles ‘Peter’ Portal and of ‘Rab’ Butler, who served as president of the board of education in Churchill’s wartime coalition government and as chancellor of the exchequer when Churchill returned to power in 1951.” (Stelzer, Working With Winston, p.222) “It was “Uncle Rab” who told his niece in December 1949 that Churchill was looking to hire a new secretary and suggested that she apply.” (Freeman, ICS, 16 July 2023) Portal worked for Churchill from December 1949, when he was still Leader of the Opposition, until April 1955, when he resigned his second and final premiership.
Why Portal left turns out to be quite the story, which took years to be told. Churchill had asked Portal to continue working for him, but Portal left Churchill’s service anyway. Ostensibly, she left to elope with Gavin Welby, from whom she was later divorced. “In 1975, Portal married Charles Williams, Baron Williams of Elvel. Her long life “extended just far enough to enable her to watch her son Justin Welby the Archbishop of Canterbury, crown King Charles III in Westminster Abbey”. (Freeman, ICS, 16 July 2023) But in later years it was discovered – and disclosed by Lady Williams – that her son, the Archbishop, was the issue of an affair immediately preceding her first marriage with another Churchill staffer, Montague Browne. Browne remained in Churchill’s service almost continuously until Churchill’s death in 1965.
All of which is to say that this is why we love doing what we do. Sure, a little bit because these portraits of Winston and Clementine provide indirect testimony to the intriguingly dramatic, sometimes scandalous, and occasionally even salacious web of relationships appended to the long public life of Winston Churchill. But, more broadly and much more significantly, because of how physical artifacts can viscerally connect us to lives long ago spent in an ever-receding past.
A decade before Vivienne captured her portrait of Winston, in November 1940 the newly minted wartime Prime Minister told the House of Commons: “History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.” Each object we handle, if we are able to discover and tell its story, steadies and brightens the lamp.
In late 1919, T. E. Lawrence was still fifteen-and-a-half years away from his untimely death. That summer, Lawrence had taken the first steps to realizing his pre-WWI ambition to set up a private press with an Oxford Friend by purchasing a property on the edge of Epping Forest. Only months before, he had begun the famously long and tortuous process of writing his account of the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He was only beginning to realize that the rest of his life would not be the retired and retiring printer of books, but would instead be defined by his First World War role in Arabia.
The context is important for the letter Lawrence wrote on 21 November 1919 to an admirer who apparently requested his autograph. The admirer was reportedly a Boy Scout who also solicited autographs from Victoria cross winners, eventually amassing a significant collection.
Lawrence’s letter is noteworthy for a number of reasons. For being signed with his surname “Lawrence” rather than the “Shaw” surname he would soon assume and use for the rest of his life. For capturing Lawrence on the cusp of the fame he would spend the rest of his famously short life struggling to reconcile and reject. And for explicitly mentioning the man who was making a fortune by making Lawrence uncomfortably famous even as this letter was being written.
Lawrence was no stickler for stationery, and would write on almost anything; we once discovered an unpublished letter from him written on the back of an RAF “Application for Mechanical Transport”! Characteristic of Lawrence, this letter is on an unadorned, undistinguished sheet of wove paper measuring 7 x 4.5 inches (17.8 x 11.4 cm), which shows evidence of having been trimmed along the left edge (notionally before Lawrence penned his missive). In eleven lines in Lawrence’s hand in black ink on one side of the sheet, he wrote:
21. XI. 19 | Yes, old son, here’s my signature, | but don’t believe that I’ll be a | famous man. It’s just an | American cinematograph artist | who found out that I was a | novelty in a Fehalai [sic] war, and | is making a lot of money out | of it. | T E Lawrence | P.S. I wish I was making something too!”
T. E. Lawrence’s (1888-1935) remarkable odyssey as instigator, organizer, hero, and tragic figure of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War transformed him from an eccentric junior intelligence officer into “Lawrence of Arabia.” But that would not have happened without “an American cinematograph artist”.
By late 1919, then 31-year-old Lawrence had experienced the failure of the Paris Peace Conference to achieve the security and sovereignty he had sought for Prince Feisal and his Arab compatriots. “Lawrence was affected deeply by his sudden political isolation and the failure to win a better settlement for Feisal… By the autumn… the strain had taken its toll… By a supreme irony, while Lawrence was trying to come to terms with the failure in Paris, London audiences were being treated to a romanticized version of his wartime career…” (Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia, pp.621-2)
This was the result of the relentless – and relentlessly effective – promotional efforts of Lowell Thomas (1892-1981). In 1917, when the United States entered the First World War, Lowell Thomas and his cameraman Harry Chase (1883-1935) were sent to Europe to find stories that would build American public support for the war. The Western Front understandably failed to inspire, so Thomas embarked for Palestine, drawn by Allenby’s campaign to wrest Jerusalem from the Ottomans.
Jerusalem had been under Muslim control since the crusaders were ejected in 1187. “For Britain the fall of Jerusalem was a notable propaganda coup…” (ODNB) Likewise, Allenby was a coup for Thomas, who would have a hand in Allenby’s subsequent portrayal “as a modern-day Richard Lionheart”. (Punch, 19 Dec 1917) Already preloaded with literary and religious associations, Palestine and the holy city of Jerusalem, along with its liberators, was the story Thomas was seeking. But there was a bigger prize than Allenby and Jerusalem, where, in early 1918, Lowell Thomas also met T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935), who consented to let Thomas capture him in photographs and on film.
This proved fateful. While Allenby became a Field Marshal, his officer, T. E. Lawrence, surpassed all military rank, propelled into legend.
Returning to America, Thomas began giving popular lectures on the war in Palestine, replete with dramatic film and images he and Chase had captured. Thomas was invited to take his lecture and film extravaganza to Britain and, in August 1919 – just a few months before Lawrence wrote this letter – began a tremendously successful run at Covent Garden. Thomas thereafter also toured England. Gradually, the show that had begun as “With Allenby in Palestine” evolved to “and Lawrence in Arabia” or “And Colonel Lawrence in Arabia”. Eventually Lawrence achieved top billing and became simply “of Arabia”. He has remained thus for more than a century.
Lawrence’s feelings about the resulting fame were famously complicated. Even this short letter is revealing. Lawrence’s personal courage and commitment to the cause of the Arab Revolt are beyond dispute. And yet in this letter he belittles both himself and his Arab comrades-in-arms, saying “I was a novelty in a Fehalai war…” Lawrence’s misspelling does not conceal the sentiment; fellah (plural fellaha) is a peasant in Arabic-speaking countries – hardly a fulsome portrayal. Lawrence also twice mentions money – both that Thomas “…is making a lot of money…” and his wish that he, Lawrence, “…was making something too!” In a contemporary letter, Lawrence wrote of Thomas’s promotions “They are… making life very difficult for me, as I have neither the money nor the wish to maintain my constant character as the mountebank he makes me.” (Wilson, p.625)
Lawrence’s biographer said of him that, in 1919, “One consequence of this sudden fame was that Lawrence began to receive large numbers of unsolicited letters… Understandably he wanted none of this, and he replied to few of the letters.” (Wilson, p.626) Fortunately, Lawrence did reply to some, as evidenced by this letter; we cannot know what prompted Lawrence in this specific case, but we do not need to know in order to appreciate both that he did, and that his reply has survived.
Lowell Thomas’s glamorous and romantic image of Lawrence permanently alloyed with the man and his accomplishments. In the years after he wrote this letter, Lawrence would work with Winston Churchill to achieve a settlement that kept faith with the Arabs for whom he had fought. Lawrence would write, destroy, rewrite, suppress, and endlessly fret his written account of the Arab Revolt. Lawrence would even change his surname to “Shaw” and enlist in the RAF in an attempt to distance himself from the indelible celebrity thrust upon him by “an American cinematograph artist”. Nonetheless, he would become and remain “Lawrence of Arabia”. This letter is an artifact of the earliest days of that indelible, inexorable fame.
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