Item #104142 Two photographs of Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill at the Bradford Town Hall on 6 December 1942. Sir Winston CHURCHILL.
CHURCHILL, Sir Winston

Two photographs of Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill at the Bradford Town Hall on 6 December 1942

Two vintage gelatin silver photographs (each 155 × 205 mm), mounted on one side of a large sheet of thick paper (405 × 285 mm, possibly removed from a loose-leaf album), now folded across the middle, well clear of the images.

They are captioned on the mount (somewhat more recently) with a silver felt-tipped pen. The high-gloss prints are slightly scuffed, and there is a tiny light mark near a top corner; overall they are in excellent condition.

The first one shows Churchill arriving, standing in the rear of an open vehicle. In the second one, he is seen addressing the huge crowd from the steps of the Town Hall. His informal speech, a warning against complacency, was widely reported at the time. The full text is readily accessible online. It finished thus: 'Our enemies are very powerful. They have many millions of soldiers. They have millions of prisoners, whom they in many cases use like slaves. They have rich lands which they have conquered, they have large, gifted populations in their grip. They have a theme of their own, which is the Nazi theme of tyranny and domination of a race in the shameful idolatry of a single man, a base man, elevated almost to the stature of a god by his demented and degraded worshippers. They have this idea of the suppression of the individual citizen, man and woman, to be a mere chattel of a State machine. All this, in our view, is at stake. But our enemies are powerful. They consider they will have the strength to wear us out even if they cannot beat us down. Their hope is now to prolong the struggle so that perhaps differences will arise between friends and allies, so that perhaps the democracies they despise and whom they underrate will weary of the war. All these are their hopes, so I say to you here in Bradford, what I said when I was last here nearly thirty years ago: "Let us go forward together and put these grave matters to the proof"'.

Item #104142

Price (AUD): $350.00