A fine presentation set, inscribed by the author to Grace Hamblin OBE (1908-2002), “the longest-serving member of Churchill’s secretarial staff” (Stelzer). Vol. 1 inscribed ‘To Grace Hamblin from Winston S Churchill 1947’, Vols. 2-6 each inscribed ‘From Winston S Churchill 1947’. The final supplementary volume, Secret Session Speeches, is not inscribed. Complete sets of the War Speeches inscribed in each volume to the same recipient are extremely rare.
Grace Hamblin originally served as a junior secretary to Churchill from 1932-1937 during the so-called “Wilderness Years”, briefly leaving the Churchills service in 1937 to care for her ageing mother, before returning 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 the first Curator of Chartwell 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 War Speeches stand as an extraordinary record of the twentieth century’s greatest orator, full of memorable phrases many of which have entered into common parlance. At the age of 23 Churchill wrote a small essay on the art of the rhetorician, ‘The Scaffolding of Rhetoric’, where he theorised on the ‘independent force’ achievable through powerful speech-making, achieving the right result by “use of a ’rapid succession of waves of sound and rapid pictures”. Churchill did not use a speechwriter, trusting in his own ability.
As with most early presentation sets of the War Speeches, which appear to have generally been assembled without concern for edition, the present set are mixed editions: Into Battle is an eleventh edition; The Unrelenting Struggling is a fourth edition; The End of the Beginning is a third edition; Onwards to Victory is a second edition; The Dawn of Liberation, Victory, and the Secret Session Speeches are all first editions.
A very good set overall: foxing to edges of text blocks and outer leaves; light shelf wear to tips of spines and corners, gilt lettering to spines dulled; lacking the dust jackets.
Cohen, A142.1.l., A172.1.e, A183.1.c, A194.1.b, A214.1.a, A233.1.a (first state), A227.2.a.
