"My visit is quite private..." - A 1 December 1947 typed letter signed from Winston S. Churchill on his Hyde Park Gate stationery to Ambassador to France Duff Cooper, a longtime friend and ally whom Churchill had appointed Ambassador while still wartime Prime Minister, confirming Churchill's attendance at Cooper's "Farewell Party" and discussing Churchill's plans for an extended sojourn in Morocco, featuring Churchill's notably warm holograph salutation, valediction, and signature.
Hyde Park Gate, London: 1 December 1947. Letter. This 1 December 1947 typed letter signed from Winston S. Churchill to his longtime friend, admirer, and ally, Duff Cooper, accepting Cooper’s invitation to a Paris party celebrating Cooper’s retirement from his post as Britain’s Ambassador to France. Churchill had appointed Cooper Britain’s Ambassador to newly-liberated France in 1944, while Churchill was still Britain’s wartime Prime Minister. Testifying to Cooper’s success and popularity in the post, Churchill’s successor as Prime Minister, Labour’s Clement Attlee, had kept the Conservative Cooper in the job for nearly two and a half years.
Condition and provenance
Churchill’s letter, which shows the warmth and familiarity between the two men, features Churchill’s holograph salutation “My dear Duffie,” and Churchill’s holograph valediction and comfortably informal signature “Yours ever, W”. The letter is typed on the rectos of two sheets of Churchill’s watermarked, laid paper, “28, Hyde Park Gate” stationery. Condition of the letter is near fine, substantially clean, unfaded, and complete apart from a single file hole punched at the upper right corner of each sheet. There are what appear to be rust stains from a staple at the upper and lower left of the first sheet, “Winston Churchill” written in pencil at the upper right of the first sheet, and a single horizontal fold to each sheet, presumably from original posting. "Winston" is written in red on the blank verso of the second page. This letter was part of the Forbes family’s incomparable Churchill collection, thereafter part of the Churchill collection of Richard C. Marsh, from whence it came to us. The letter is protected within a clear, removable, archival sleeve housed in a rigid, crimson cloth folder.
Churchill's retinue and plans
The content is intriguingly diverse in content for a letter given the notional intent to confirm his attendance at Cooper’s “Farewell Party.” Winston explains that his wife (herein “Clemmie”) is not coming but that Winston will be accompanied by “Sarah” (his daughter, Sarah Millicent Hermione Churchill, 1914-1982) and “Colonel Bill Deakin” (Frederick William Dampier “Bill” Deakin, 1913-2005), “an Oxford don” whose wartime bonafides Churchill presents before stating “He helps me in my book.” Churchill seeks accommodations for Deakin, as well as “two secretaries, a valet and a detective”. The reason for the retinue is that Churchill was planning an extended sojourn in Marrakech after seeing Cooper in Paris. Conscious of the wake and worries inherent to his status, Churchill asks Cooper to please “ask the French Government to let the authorities in Morocco know that I am proposing to stay there from December 11 until the last week in January… My visit is quite private but they would probably like to be informed beforehand.”
Duff Cooper
Alfred Duff Cooper (1890-1954) and Churchill had formed what would become a 40-year friendship after meeting for the first time in 1914, during the First World War, when Cooper was 24 and Churchill 39. When Churchill wrote this letter, Cooper had recently experienced a career apogee; his success as Ambassador to France was crowned on 4 March 1947 “by the signature of a treaty of alliance between Britain and France at Dunkirk.” Cooper was educated at Eton and Oxford, served with the Grenadier Guards during the First World War, and was elected to Parliament as a Conservative in 1924. He served as: Secretary for War (1935-37); First Lord of the Admiralty (1937-38); Minister of Information (1940-41); and Ambassador to France (1944-47). Cooper was married to Lady Diana Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland and a successful actress. Cooper was knighted in 1948 and created 1st Viscount Norwich in 1952, during Churchill’s final premiership.
Churchill’s “Finest Hour” had come on 10 May 1940, when he became wartime Prime Minister of a beleaguered Britain on the edge of falling to Hitler’s Germany. Cooper arguably had his own “Finest Hour” in October 1938. He was dining with Churchill at the Other Club when it was announced that the Munich Agreement, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s craven attempt to appease Hitler, had been signed. At the time, Cooper was First Lord of the Admiralty – the position Churchill had held from 1911-1915 and would hold again from late-1939 to mid-1940. The next day, Cooper resigned from the Government in protest. Cooper’s wife, Lady Diana, telephoned Churchill to tell him the news and later recalled in her memoirs how, as she spoke, “his voice was broken with emotion. I could hear him cry.”
Churchill would spend much of his time in Marrakech working with the indispensable Deakin on Churchill’s Second World War memoirs – apropos given that his publisher substantially subsidized the trip. Cooper would devote much of his own imminent retirement to writing, culminating in the 1953 publication of his autobiography, Old Men Forget, “an eloquent, stylish, and in many ways revealing account of a life that was not totally successful in worldly terms but was never dull.” Churchill and Cooper remained friends until the latter’s death.
References: Cooper, Old Men Forget; Gilbert Vol. VIII; ODNB. Item #008313
Price: $7,500.00