TYPED LETTER SIGNED BY WINSTON CHURCHILL TO JOHN “JOCK” COLVILLE

Description

A typed letter on 28 Hyde Park Gate letterhead, dated “15 October, 1950” to John Colville, Churchill’s Private Secretary during World War II and after, right through Churchill’s second stint as Prime Minister. No one was closer to Churchill at work than Sir John Rupert Colville (1915-1987), familiarly known as “Jock.”

My dear Jock, (In ink, all in Churchill’s hand.)

I was very much obliged to you for your letter, and I am sorry that pressure of work has prevented me from replying to it before now. As you surmise, Foot’s review “left me cold,” but I am nevertheless grateful to you for taking the trouble of putting the facts as you remember them in writing to the Foreign Office Librarian.

Yours sincerely, (In ink, all in Churchill’s hand:)

W.

“Out of concern for Churchill,” wrote Sir Martin Gilbert in Volume VIII of the Official Biography, “and as an eyewitness, Jock Colville was angered by Michael Foot’s review of Churchill’s Third Volume [of his Second World War Memoirs]. Foot wrote, of the events of June 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union: ‘the suggestion that Mr. Churchill was anything other than convinced of the Russian inability to withstand the German attack amounts to a downright falsehood.’ In an indignant letter to Churchill, Colville wrote that he could ‘at least provide oral testimony that Foot was wrong: “On that Sunday, in June 1941…I remember a discussion on this very point at Chequers. Sir John Dill and Mr. Winant both thought the Russians could not last six weeks…I remember your closing the discussion with the following words: ‘I will bet anybody here a Monkey to a Mousetrap that the Russians are still fighting, and fighting gloriously, two years from now.’ …’So much,’ Colville added, ‘for Michael Foot.'”

The letter is in mint condition.