A fine association copy of this abridged one-volume edition of Chuchill’s monumental history of the Second World War, inscribed by the editor Denis Kelly (1916-199) to Grace Hamblin OBE (1908-2002), the longest-serving member of Winston S. Churchill’s secretarial staff, in black ink to the front free endpaper: ‘To Grace in celebration of twelve years happy collaboration! Denis Kelly 17 February 1959’.
Hamblin originally served as a junior secretary to Churchill from 1932-1937 during the so-called “Wilderness Years”, then acting as Clementine Churchill’s assistant from 1939-1945, accompanying Clementine on her post-war tour of red cross hospitals in the Soviet Union. After the war, Hamblin was appointed secretary and administrator at Chartwell, continuing in her role as Chartwell’s first Curator after the house became a National Trust property in 1966. In 1965, Hamblin was one of the very few non-family members invited to attend Churchill’s burial service at St Martin’s Church, Bladon. “Grace Hamblin died in 2002, aged ninety-four. She had spent seventy of those years working with the Churchills and strengthening and promoting their memory, the longest-serving member of Churchill’s secretarial staff” (Stelzer, Working with Winston, p. 45). Hamblin earned some posthumous notoriety when her apparent role in the suppression of Graham Sutherland’s controversial portrait of Churchill was revealed.
Churchill’s Second World War stands as one of the supreme historical achievements of the twentieth century, commonly cited as a major factor in Churchill being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. As Max Beloff observed, there was no statesman of the twentieth century ‘whose retrospective accounts of the great events in which he has taken part have so dominated subsequent historical thinking’.
An excellent copy, jacket slightly edge worn with minor spotting to verso. An unusually difficult book to find in collectible condition.
