Churchill cigar among memorabilia sold at London auction

Jun 2, 2010, 20:28 GMT

London - Memorabilia of Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill, ranging from highly-sensitive political letters to books and a Cuban cigar, were sold for nearly 600,000 pounds (877,000 dollars) at auction in London Wednesday.

Christie's auction house said the sale included correspondence in which the wartime prime minister told a close aide to forget about suggestions that Britain should agree to a truce with Nazi Germany.

The two letters, written in 1940, were offered together with a pre-sale estimate of a maximum of 8,000 pounds, but were sold to a private buyer for 34,850 pounds.

Rejecting a suggestion in a letter from his assistant private secretary, Eliot Crawshaw-Williams to seek a truce with Adolf Hitler, Churchill wrote back: 'I return it to you - to burn and forget.'

Churchill, who was prime minister from 1940 to 1945, and then again from 1951 to 1955, died in 1965, aged 90.

An unsmoked Havana cigar in a box also beat its estimate of 1,500 pounds to fetch an auction price of 2,125 pounds, Christie's said. It put the total yield of the sale at 577,063 pounds.

Christie's has described the items as the most important and wide-ranging collection of its kind.

They come from a private collection amassed over more than 30 years by Forbes Inc chief executive Malcolm S Forbes Jr, grandson of Forbes magazine founder BC Forbes.

There will be two further sales from the collection, one in New York on December 3 and another in London next year.