August 1, 2013

Finest Hour 122, Spring 2004

Page 15

Send your questions to the editor

Q: What is a “Squeezer pen,” to which Mr. Churchill refers in his 17 February 1908 speech to the Author’s Club? —Dr. Mark Kimble ([email protected])

A: From the speech: “To sit at one’s table on a sunny morning, with four clear hours of uninterruptible security, plenty of nice white paper, and a Squeezer pen [laughter]—that is true happiness.” Our informants agree that a “Squeezer pen” was a fountain pen of the bladder type, which had just been invented around this time.

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Q: In your excellent website, the page on Churchill’s funeral states that it was the first state funeral accorded to a commoner since the Duke of Wellington. The Duke of Wellington was not a commoner, was he?

A: The Duke of Wellington was indeed a commoner. The word commoner in this context means non-royal. Members of the peerage are not automatically royals, though some are for other reasons e.g. marriage. But we’re going to correct this reference—there have been more State funerals for commoners than is generally realized, and Churchill’s was the last since Earl Roberts, viz.

1778: William Pitt (the Elder), the Earl of Chatham
1806: Vice Admiral the Viscount Nelson [died 1805]
1806: William Pitt (the Younger)
1852: Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington
1898: William Ewart Gladstone
1914: Field Marshal the Earl Roberts
1965: Sir Winston Churchill —PHC

Q: To ICS, UK: My father in-law has acquired a copy of The Second World War, vol. 2, Their Finest Hour, published by Cassell in 1949, with a leather binding, signed “W.S. C.” Can you tell me more about this book and how much it is worth? It is in very good condition and he is very fond of it.

A: We’d have to see the book to determine authenticity, since there are many forgeries about. But when he initialed a book “W.S.C.,” it was usually a subsequent volume in a multivolume set in which he had already signed the first volume. It is likely that this volume was once part of a set in which vol. 1, The Gathering Storm, was inscribed “Winston S. Churchill,” with subsequent volumes initialed as they came out, especially since it has a leather binding, which is not of course original. It is unlikely that a single volume would be rebound in leather, which suggests that it came from a set. Some unscrupulous booksellers get a multi-volume work in which some or all of the subsequent volumes are initialed and break them up, trying to make more by selling the inscribed volumes piecemeal. Of course not all sets were initialed all the way through—in fact, such sets are rare.

Initialed copies are not nearly so valuable as full inscribed ones, and leather bindings are more collectible in Britain than they are in North America. A leather binding is especially detrimental in this case because it will be hard to match up to make a set. Assuming it is genuine, it might be worth up to £500 depending on condition.

Q: I am working on a paper that compares Winston Churchill to King Arthur. I am sure you can appreciate the attraction to this idea as the legendary king supposedly saved England. The paper will compare values—chivalry mainly. Did Churchill’s library contain books by the Medievalist writers, like Sir Walter Scott?
—Philip Visnansky ([email protected])

A: By terms of Churchill’s will, his children were permitted to remove books from the Chartwell library after his death, so its exact contents in his lifetime are hard to determine. But find a copy of Savrola, Churchill’s novel, and read what he says about Savrola’s library. It is widely held that the hero was Churchill’s vision of himself. He read and owned all those books. See also his autobiography My Early Life for the books he read while stationed in India as a young man.

We’ve been told that he owned and cherished a multi-volume set of European history by Klop and a history of the Crimean War by Kinglake. He remarked on one occasion that he structured his own prose by studying Kinglake, along with Macaulay and Gibbon.

Finally, use our website search engine to look for words like “library,” and other appropriate key words.