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CHURCHILL, Winston S. Arms and the Covenant. Speeches by Churchill. Compiled by Randolph S. Churchill . London: George G. Harrap, 1938.
CHURCHILL, Winston S. Arms and the Covenant. Speeches by Churchill. Compiled by Randolph S. Churchill . London: George G. Harrap, 1938. 8° (222 x 153mm). Original blue cloth (extremities rubbed). PRESENTATION COPY TO GUY BURGESS (front free endpaper inscribed by Winston Churchill 'To Guy Burgess from Winston S. Churchill. To confirm his admirable sentiments. October 1938,' with a pencil inscription below in another hand, adding the word 'Munich' in brackets, marking the word 'sentiment' with an asterisk and adding in parentheses '* and we were right, Anthony Eden'). Provenance : Christie's South Kensington, 6 June 1997, lot 14. FIRST EDITION, IMPORTANT PRESENTATION COPY TO THE SPY AND TRAITOR, GUY BURGESS. Gilbert describes the meeting between Churchill and Burgess and the presentation of this book: 'Churchill spent Saturday October 1 [1938] at Chartwell, where he was visited by a young BBC producer, Guy Burgess, who, after some difficulty, had persuaded the BBC to ask Churchill to give a half-hour talk on the Mediterranean. As a result of the Czech crisis, Churchill asked to cancel the talk; then invited Burgess to visit him and talk it over. Burgess arrived at eleven o'clock. According to Burgess' biographer (Tom Driberg. Guy Burgess, a Portrait with Background , 1956), Churchill was carrying a trowel when Burgess arrived, as he had been building a wall ( Winston S. Churchill , volume V, pp. 990-992). Churchill was pre-occupied at the time with Chamberlain's submission to Hitler over Czechoslovakia at Munich. He had received a plea for advice from the Czech President, Benes (whom he referred to as 'Herr Beans') and, to Burgess' evident surprise, asked the young producer for his views on the subject. Burgess 'suggested diffidently that Churchill could offer the assistance of his eloquence: he could stump the country with speeches of protest ... Churchill gave his visitor a copy of Arms and the Covenant , which he inscribed: "To Guy Burgess, from Winston S. Churchill, to confirm his admirable sentiments." They had talked together for some hours' ( ibid p. 991). Guy Burgess (1910-63) was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge where he joined the Communist Party. Recruited as a Soviet spy in the 1930s, he worked with the BBC (1936-39), wrote war propaganda (1939-41), and, while ostensibly working for the BBC, served with MI5. After the war he was a member of the foreign office, and finally second secretary under fellow traitor Kim Philby in Washington in 1950. Recalled in 1951 for 'serious misconduct', he, together with Donald Maclean, another 'Cambridge Spy', defected to the Soviet Union and became a resident in Moscow, where he died. 'Burgess was intellectually brilliant but treacherous, ideologically committed but undisciplined; an ambitious extrovert but destructive when drunk, he remains a peculiarly English conundrum' (ODNB). Woods A44(a).