CHURCHILL, Winston S.

£25,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington

The Second World War. First UK editions, signed and dated by Churchill in each volume for Michael Hughes-Young, then working at Conservative Central Office and later an MP. Complete sets signed throughout for a single recipient are scarce in commerce, many having been dispersed into individual signed volumes over the intervening decades.Churchill has signed on the half-title or initial blanks, and dated them 1950, 1949, 1950, 1954, 1954, & 1954 respectively. Hughes-Young added his ownership signature or inscription to each volume, in four cases on the same page as Churchill's signature. Hughes-Young (1912-1980) was a fellow Old Harrovian who served in the reconquest of Abyssinia and in Europe during the Second World War, in which he was wounded twice and awarded the Military Cross. He retired from the army in 1947 and worked in the publicity department of Conservative Central Office from 1948 to 1955. He entered Parliament as Conservative MP for Wandsworth Central in 1955 and served as Deputy Chief Whip from 1959 to 1964.The Second World War was Churchill's masterpiece, the single most important historical account of the conflict and a major factor in his award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953. The US editions were published slightly earlier due to contractual obligations, but Churchill treated the UK Cassell editions as the authorized firsts and reserved his final proof corrections for them.

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