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Auction: 16043 - Autographs, Historical Documents, Ephemera and Postal History
Lot: 79

Documents
Winston Churchill
1900 (8 September) typewritten letter to his aunt Leonie Leslie on his first flat and a trip to Paris. It is signed "Yours affectionally Winston" with the postscript, "forgive dictation". Churchill rejoices in being established in his first bachelor quarters, a set of "beautiful rooms" in Mount Street which have been passed on to him by his cousin Sunny (9th Duke of Marlborough); he is now much more comfortable than when living with his mother at Cumberland Place, "but of course I no longer live for nothing". He asks his aunt to help him improve the rooms on her return from Ireland, being himself indifferent to this sort of "material arrangement ... so long as my table is clear and there is plenty of paper, I do not worry about the rest". He has just returned from Paris with Sunny and his other cousin, Ivor [Guest], and reports unfavourably on the Exposition Universelle, criticising the lack of "cleverness" in the arrangements, comparing large parts of the exhibition to "parts of Whiteley’s shop", and in particular finding fault with the inefficiency of the characteristically French trio of ticket seller, ticket puncher and ticket collector at the door of each stall. Before moving into Mount Street, Churchill had continued to use his mother’s house at 35a Cumberland Place as his London home; he was to remain in Mount Street until 1905. The 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle inaugurated a number of Paris’s most celebrated buildings, including the Grand and Petit Palais, the Pont Alexandre III and the Gare (now Musée) d’Orsay, as well as the first line of the Paris Metro. On headed paper; previously mounted in album with adherences on reverse, first page missing lower right corner. Photo

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, RA (1874 – 1965) a British statesman who was the Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an honorary citizen of the United States.


For a 1919 letter, see lot 79

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