August 13, 2013

Finest Hour 125, Winter 2004-05

Page 42

Woods Corner – A bibliophile’s department named for Frederick Woods, first bibliographer of Sir Winston Churchill
“The Only Sure Guarantee of Peace”

By Steven Raab

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Ihave been aware for twenty-five years that a family in Baltimore had an extraordinary collection of autographs, assembled between the 1920s and 1940s. In 1978, they sold a colleague of mine an important Civil War letter of Stonewall Jackson, saying this was just the tip of the iceberg. They were secretive, even unfriendly, and would give no details. Every now and again, they would take out a piece and sell it. I happened to be in the right place a decade ago when they offered and I bought a most interesting Churchill holograph from 1920:

The consciousness of a common purpose in great matters between Britain and the United States is the only sure guarantee of the future peace of the world.
Winston S. Churchill
War Office, 16.2.20

I researched it as carefully as I know how, not giving it the benefit of any doubt, until I was sure it was authentic. Then I put it into my personal collection. My assumption is that the initial collector not only bought autographs from previous eras, but also wrote to notables at the time, and somehow elicited this response from Churchill; one can only imagine what other answers he received.

It is true that I have decided to put this piece up for sale. However, I have been interested in Churchill since 1962, and my main interest is scholarly. I contacted Finest Hour because I thought people might be excited to read the statement that it was historically valuable.

Editor’s Note:

Finest Hour does not accept commercial solicitations, but this holograph note, which does seem to us authentic, is historically most interesting. If the item has not been sold yet, we will put anyone who inquires in touch with Mr. Raab.

Online Dictionary of National Biography

Professor Paul Addison, academic fellow of The Churchill Centre and author of the highly acclaimed I, has written a 30,000 word entry on Churchill for the new Dictionary of National Biography, a mammoth work of 60 volumes covering the lives of 55,000 people. One of its best features is an online subscription (http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb) which allows any factual errors constantly to be corrected. If therefore anyone spots a factual error please report it to Prof. Addison ([email protected]).

Having written the entry, Addison developed it into a concise, 85,000-word biography to be published in 2005: Churchill: The Unexpected Hero. The U.S. edition is part of a “Lives and Legacies.” The book tells the story of Churchill’s life in parallel with the history of his reputation, with some reflections at the end on developments since 1965. It will be interesting to compare Addison’s conclusions with those of John Ramsden in his Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and His Legend Since 1945.

Churchill Articles in Life

“Woods Corner” in Finest Hour 123 listed the serialized appearances of Churchill’s The Second World War in Life magazine. As promised, here are the other Churchill Life appearances. A slashmark (/) means the article appears on the pages cited, but not the intervening pages.

Individual Articles

28Jan46: Secret War Speech (Woods C470, dealing with the fall of Singapore, 23Apr42), pp. 27-31, 43-46.
4Feb46: Darlan: Secret War Speech (C471, concerning the assassination of Darlan, 10Dec42), pp. 84/99.
14Apr47: If I Were an American (C476), pp. 106/123.

History of the English-Speaking Peoples

Vol. 1 (1956, Woods C519)
19Mar: The Birth of Britain, pp. 75/108
26Mar: The Norman Conquest, pp. 86/118
2Apr: Barons Against the King, pp. 64/91
9Apr: Trial and Torment, pp. 177/208

Vol. 2 (1956, C520)
29Oct: The New World, pp. 76/107
5Nov: Days of Glory, Good Queen Bess, pp. 144/172
12Nov: High Venture and Civil War, pp. 178/204
19Nov: The Curse of Cromwell, pp. 160/184

Vol. 3 (1957, C521)
15Apr: America’s War of Independence, pp. 120/148
22Apr: The New Nation, pp. 84/115
29Apr: Famous Men in a Century of Wars, pp. 86/111

Vol. 4 (1958, C522)
24Feb: The Noblest War, pp. 76/96
3Mar: An Age of Unrest, pp. 58/76
10Mar: Great Men in a Vivid Era, pp. 74/94

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