Churchill (Sir Winston Spencer) The Unrelenting Struggle, third edition, signed by the author on endpaper, plates, silk endpapers, original black morocco, very light fading to spine, light rubbing to spine tips and corners, [Woods A89], 8vo, 1943.

⁂ A signed copy of Churchill's speeches in the publisher's presentation binding. This volume and those in the following 3 lots bear a marked similarity to the sets of The Second World War that were specially-bound by the publisher for presentation. These however appear rarer than those sets (themselves scarce) and are unrecorded by Woods. It seems likely therefore that these are among a very small number bound at Churchill's request for presentation. We can trace only a handful of like examples of these speeches in such a binding, all are either presentation copies or from Chartwell House library.

Provenance: Sir John Peck, K.C.M.G. (1913-1995). Peck joined the Civil Service in 1936. Appointed Assistant Private Secretary to First Lord of the Admiralty. When Churchill became P.M. in May 1940, he was appointed as one of four Private Secretaries, and was the only one to serve him throughout the war. Following the loss of the General Election in 1945, he served Attlee briefly, and then transferred to the Foreign Office in 1946. Latterly he held a number of roles within the Civil Service before his final appointment as British Ambassador to Dublin 1970-73.