CHURCHILL WINSTON S.: (1874-1965) British Prime Minister 1940-45, 1951-55. Nobel Prize winner for Literature, 1953. A good, early A.L.S., Winston S. Churchill, four pages, 8vo, Salisbury Hall, St. Albans, 30th August 1908, to Viscount Northcliffe, marked ‘Private’. Churchill announces ‘I am vy. glad indeed to get a token of peace & acuity from you…I shall often use & always value it’ and continues 'I wish you would tell 'that old paper' to go on reporting me verbatim in the country as it has been doing lately. I have not many public engagements & if I knew beforehand that I was going to be decently reported I would take pains to produce something worth printing. But what always seems to happen is that when I have something important to say no one takes any notice of it, & when I deliver an ordinary party impromptu it is reported in the first person' further remarking 'The uncertainty about reporting prevents politicians from taking trouble about speeches. In consequence, they deliver perfectly idiotic speeches & the newspapers are still further choked off reporting them' and adding, 'You tell your 'old paper' to report me verbatim at Dundee, at Manchester & at Newcastle - that is three times in the next six months: & I will see that they get good copy from any point of view.' Churchill further notes ‘The ‘young paper’ is taking a vy. friendly interest in the wedding – I observe’ before concluding by wishing Northcliffe good luck on his travels and again thanking him for his gift. An intriguing letter on the role of the printed media. Some very light, extremely minor age wear, otherwise EX
Alfred Harmsworth (1865-1922) 1st Viscount Northcliffe, British Newspaper and Publishing Magnate, owner of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror.
Shortly before the present letter was written, on 17th August, Churchill had been in Swansea, where, in a major speech on Anglo-German relations he criticised those ‘who try to spread the belief in this country that war between Great Britain and Germany is inevitable’ and as for those who argued that Germany was a threat, a rival and a danger, ‘these two great peoples’, Churchill said, ‘have nothing to fight about’. The politician visited Dundee on 10th October where he spoke of the opportunities opening up for State intervention in the social field (Asquith and Lloyd George had just introduced Government financed pensions for those over seventy). Churchill was also to deliver a speech calling for social change when he visited Newcastle on 5th February.
Although Churchill’s brother Jack had, on 7th August, married Lady Gwendeline Bertie, he is most likely referring to his own upcoming marriage in the present letter when he writes of the ‘interest in the wedding’. The news of Churchill’s engagement to Clementine Hozier had been made public on 15th August and the couple were married on 12th September at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, the parish church of the House of Commons.