Churchill, Winston | Lord Randolph Churchill, presentation copy to Arthur Clark Kennedy

Churchill, Winston

Lord Randolph Churchill. London: Macmillan and Co., 1906

2 vols, 8vo. Photographic frontispieces; scattered light foxing. Publisher's red cloth, stamped and lettered in gilt; bumped at edges. Collector's clamshell box.

[with:] Autograph letter signed, from Winston Churchill to Arthur Clark Kennedy, thanking him for his translations, offering him in exchange an inscribed copy of his biography of his father, 2 pages, January 19 1925, on Chancellor of the Exchequer headed paper, in envelope addressed to Chillingham Castle, Northumberland; old folds.

First edition, inscribed and signed by the author to Arthur Clark Kennedy on the fly leaf.

Churchill wrote this biography of his father, the Tory politician and aristocrat, between 1903 and 1905. It received a positive critical response, though was said to stray away from the more extreme and controversial sides of Lord Randolph's personality. Theodore Roosevelt called it "a clever, tactful and rather cheap and vulgar life of that clever, tactful and rather cheap and vulgar egotist."

Arthur Clark Kennedy was agent to Charles Augustus Grey Bennett, 9th Earl of Tankerville at Chillingham Castle from 1923 until 1926. An accompanying photocopy of a letter dated 19 September 1966 to ("Mr Cahn") details a trip to Chillingham Castle to find out information about Mr Kennedy on his behalf. The entertaining letter describes travelling around the local area asking people for information. It transpired that Mr Kennedy married the secretary of the Earl of Tankerville, in somewhat gossip-inducing circumstances, who could speak French and did translations, and indeed may have undertaken the work that Churchill gave this book as a gift in exchange for.

REFERENCE:

Cohen A17.1; Woods A8a

PROVENANCE:

Arthur Clark Kennedy (presentation inscription and bookplate)—Sotheby's London, 10 July 1956, lot 371—Mr Cahn (accompanying letter)