TLS signed “Winston S. Churchill,” one page, 8 x 10, Morpeth Mansions letterhead, November 20, 1934. Letter to A. J. Cummings. In full: “I shall be dealing with this subject in a speech which I hope to deliver on the address. I agree with you there is great exaggeration. But when all exaggeration has been shorn away we still remain confronted in my opinion - and I have given great thought and study to the matter - with a mortal peril.” Churchill has added the greeting in his own hand, “My dear Mr. Cummings,” as well. Central horizontal and vertical fold, some light creasing and wrinkles, and some scattered light soiling, otherwise fine condition.
Churchill spend most of the 1930s out of political favor with the British powers that be. Nevertheless, the statesman refused to turn a blind eye toward the growing threat to world security being mounted by Adolf Hitler and Germany. Just a few days before he wrote this letter, as part of a persistent crusade, he warned in an address that Germany was ‘rearming with utmost speed’ and called on British leaders to make itself ‘the strongest air power in the European world.’ Such an act was necessary, Churchill correctly predicted, if England was to protect itself from Germany, which had once already fought for world domination. “I have given great thought and study to the matter - with a mortal peril,” he states in this letter, reiterating his point of view. Eight days later, he would address the House of Commons and yet again call attention to the rearmament of Germany and ‘instilling into the hearts of its youth and manhood the most extreme patriotic nationalist and militarist conceptions.’ In the end, regardless of any “exaggeration” of facts that may have existed, Germany had to be watched—a prophecy that came true as Churchill would later defend Great Britain against the Nazis. Pre-certified John Reznikoff/PSA/DNA and RRAuction COA.
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