“England owes you many apologies” – Churchill’s articles against appeasement, inscribed to Anthony Eden
41 CHURCHILL, Winston S. Step by Step 1936–1939. London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1939 £37,500 [ 160397 ] Octavo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, wide blind rules to spine and front cover, publisher’s logo in blind to front cover. Sketch map of China to the text, folding map of Europe to rear. Anthony Eden’s bookplate to front pastedown. Very light sunning and rubbing to spine, toning to endpapers, still a near-fine copy. ¶ Cohen A111.1.a; Langworth pp. 196–8; Woods A45. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume V, Companion Part 3 Documents , 1982
First edition, first impression, a superb presentation copy, inscribed by Churchill to former foreign secretary and future prime minister Anthony Eden on the front free endpaper, “To Anthony from Winston June 1939”. Eden wrote to Churchill on receiving this copy: “I am delighted with the present of ‘Step by Step’. Thank you very much for sending it to me. The reading of it is somewhat painful but no doubt salutary. The book is a record of perspicacity and courage on your part. England owes you many apologies” (5 July 1939, in Gilbert, p. 1548). Step by Step collects Churchill’s powerful series of articles against appeasement, originally published in the E vening Standard and syndicated throughout Europe from 1936 to 1939. Inscribed in the month of publication, just three months before the outbreak of the Second World War, this is an unparalleled association copy: Eden and Churchill were two of the few senior political figures to oppose appeasement and warn of the dangers, with Eden resigning as foreign secretary over the issue just over a year previously. Both were unhappily vindicated by events: Clement Attlee wrote to Churchill on receiving his own inscribed copy of Step by Step that “it must be a melancholy satisfaction to you to see how right you were” (cited in Cohen), a sentiment which could be applied to Eden also. Eden is naturally referenced many times in the book given his central role in foreign affairs, serving as foreign secretary from December 1935 to February 1938. Included is the chapter “Carry On!”, originally published on 4 March 1938, where Churchill responds to Eden’s resignation, and in the aftermath the move by Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax towards an even firmer appeasement line. Churchill wrote of Eden’s resignation that “in Mr. Eden the National Government have lost their only popular figure . . . British foreign policy has become for the moment even more than usually incomprehensible to her friends and well-wishers on the Continent and all over the world” (p. 219). It might be expected that Churchill’s opposition to appeasement would ensure he applauded Eden’s principled resignation, but he instead saw Eden in the foreign office in these years as a bulwark against the dictators, with his resignation thus intensifying the slide to war. In Churchill’s war memoirs he records the deep despair he fell into on hearing of Eden’s resignation: “There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses. He seemed at this moment to embody the life-hope of the British nation, the grand old British race that had done so much for men, and had yet some more to give. Now he was gone” ( Second World War , vol. I, 1948, p. 201). The same quote is indicative of the profound respect that Churchill had for Eden, and indeed their similarity in outlook and in their vision for the British people. The two men were inseparable for two decades. Eden was re-appointed
foreign secretary by Churchill in the wartime government, where he served Churchill loyally, skilfully navigating the turbulence of the war, and accepting Churchill’s preference to personally conduct the most important negotiations with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. On the great man’s retirement, Eden succeeded him as prime minister and party leader.
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