Churchill’s wartime letter to NFU sells for £1650

A typed letter signed by Britain’s wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill sold for £1,650 when it went under the hammer at a leading Shropshire fine art auction house this afternoon (Wednesday).

The letter, dated 14th October, 1940 and addressed to the President of the National Farmers’ Union, Bedford Square WC 1, referred to agricultural price levels, food production and the impact of the Second World War.

It states: "I need not tell you that the food production of our country is, at this hour of supreme crisis, one of the vital factors in our ability to resist and overcome a formidable enemy…"

Each page of the three-piece letter was mounted with the Prime Minister’s crest and address. The envelope was dated 17th September, a month prior to the date of the letter.

The letter was consigned to Halls’ 585-lot Christmas collective auction at the Welsh Bridge saleroom in Shrewsbury by the grandson of the late Sir Tom Peacock, who was NFU president from 1939-’41.

All the saleroom’s telephone lines were booked in an advance of the auction and the letter was eventually purchased by a bidder from the London specialist trade.

Another lot that attracted great interest was an album of signatures by famous people, which sold for £2,200.

The album included a letter signed and possibly written by Lafayette dated 13th July 1785 to two pages written in French, a personal letter by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-’98), better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll and a letter by John Ruskin dated 3rd Dec 86. Other signatures included the Duke of Wellington, Robert Browning, Robert Peel and Sir Moses Montefiore. It was consigned by a vendor from North Shropshire.

Two 19th century volumes of ballads and narrative poems and sonnets and lyrical poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) sold for £1,500 to the delight of an East Shropshire vendor.