40 9th June 2012 antiquarian books


Finest hour for two inscribed Churchills


NEW York’s Morgan Library & Museum has recently launched a new website, DiscoverChurchill.org, in co-operation with the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge, and developed in conjunction with the Churchill: The Power of Words exhibition that opens at the New York library on June 8. A good few of those Churchillian


words were seen in a Bonhams sale of March 17 in London, where a small group of presentation copies inscribed for Neville Chamberlain – entered for sale from the collection of his daughter-in-law – were on offer. A fine and bright set of the four


volumes that make up The World Crisis inscribed to Chamberlain was broken into three lots, the copies of the third and fourth volumes, The Aftermath (1929) and The Eastern Front (1931), selling at £9500 apiece, and the two earlier volumes dealing with the years 1916- 18 making £15,000 as a pair. Issued in March 1927, the latter are annotated by Chamberlain as having been avidly read that very month. Presented to and read by Chamberlain


ten years later, in December 1937, a copy of Great Contemporaries – a work that contains Churchill’s assessment of Hitler – was sold at £18,000, but bid to £37,000 was a set of Marlborough. His Life and Times (four vols., 1933- 38) that Churchill inscribed for Chamberlain. The final


Albums valued at just £800 bring in £56,000


■ Bermuda and Canada content pushes up albums price


INITIALLY valued at just £800, two albums of watercolours, sketches and photographs relating to the life and travels of Colonel Ernest Gilling Hallewell brought a few moments of high excitement to an Exmouth saleroom. Collectors and dealers from both sides


of the Atlantic pushed the bidding for the albums to £56,000 on April 30. They were described in a Piers


Motley Auctions catalogue as containing ‘Sketches from Nature Foreign and Home’ – these being the titles lettered on the covers – and among them were numerous scenes of Bermuda and Canada, sketches relating to a voyage to the Crimea, as well views taken in Wales, at Fountains Abbey, Chatsworth and Windsor Castle. The albums also included early photographs of Malta, Gibraltar, Corfu and the Crimea. The key is in the name Hallewell:


a soldier and talented amateur artist whose one published collection, Views in the Bermudas of 1848, is a legendary rarity. The auctioneers report that after the


catalogue went live, they had interest from Bermuda, a Canadian institution, New York and the numerous UK dealers and collectors, and a much higher price began to look likely. It seemed quite likely that it was the


Bermuda content which accounted for all the excitement and Piers Motley-Nash tells me that though in his view these were not the most accomplished of the views, the underbidder was interested only in those 11 pages that dealt with Bermuda. In the end however, the albums were


volume was given in the month before Chamberlain signed the infamous ‘Peace in Our Time’ agreement in Munich. Beneath his presentation inscription in


that fourth volume, Churchill has written “Perhaps you may like to take refuge in the eighteenth century”, a sentiment which may or may not be an example of his sardonic humour. The sums paid for the last two


mentioned lots were both below estimate, but record prices all the same. A very different item of Churchilliana


was seen at Keys of Aylsham sale on March 30, where an unused pair of beeswax, cotton and lanolin earplugs, custom-made for Churchill and still boxed with their original plaster casts (pictured above) sold for £1650.


Above: an unused pair of beeswax, cotton and lanolin earplugs, custom made for Churchill and still boxed with their original plaster casts, sold for £1650 at Keys.


acquired for stock by Maggs, who felt that the more numerous Canadian views were equally appealing and significant. Published in London in 1848, Views in


the Bermudas comprises 13 litho plates by W. Parrott after Hallewell, plates that actually make up three panoramas of the islands from different vantage points. Hallewell was posted in the 1840s


to the British garrison in Bermuda as a young officer in the East Devons and did his career no harm at all by wooing and wedding the governor’s daughter, Sophia, and it was probably at his father-in-law’s encouragement that these watercolour panoramas were produced. Lt Col Reid was keen to see the


agricultural and commercial development


“Hallewell’s one published collection, Views of the Bermudas of 1848, is a legendary rarity”


of the islands and forwarded the finished drawings to the Colonial Office in London, to “convey to persons interested an idea of the nature of this singular group of islands and harbours”. A Bermuda website on painters who


have worked on the islands reckons only eight to 10 sets are currently in private ownership there and book auction records for the last 40 years show only two other copies – an incomplete and probably uncoloured copy sold for a modest sum in 1981, and a complete coloured copy, the plates all mounted on card and loose as issued in the original portfolio, which sold for £15,000 at Sotheby’s in 1986. However, such things sometimes


turn up in topographical picture or print sales and I was able to track down another set sold in 1990 at Sotheby’s for £28,000. In fact, it proved to be the same one. Initially sold as part of the castle library of the Earl of Berkeley, it had come back to auction in a print sale, this time catalogued as the property of “A Gentleman, of Bermuda and Kent”. My own records also show that in


2008, Holloways of Banbury sold for £10,500 an uncoloured and foxed set they had valued at just £70-100, but


Above: a view of Quebec, dated 1847, from the Hallewell albums. Left: Fort Cunningham, Bermuda, from Long Island, 1844, one of the original watercolour sketches from the two Hallewell albums sold by Piers Motley for £56,000.


that would seem to be it for Views in the Bermudas. Hallewell’s military career must have


taken him to Canada and he later served in the Crimea at Alma, Inkerman and Sebastopol with the North Gloucestershire Regiment of Foot. He retired from active service in 1864, but at time of his early death was the Commandant of Sandhurst. Between 1850 and 1853 Hallewell exhibited landscapes in the Royal Academy, British Institution and the Society of British Artists.


BUYER’S PREMIUMS


Bloomsbury Auctions, London: 22% to £250,000, 12% thereafter Bonhams, London: 25% to £25,000, then 20% to £500,000, 12% thereafter Christie’s New York: 25% to $50,000, then 20% to $1m, 12% thereafter Keys, Aylsham: 15% Piers Motley Auctions, Exmouth: 15%


NB: premiums may not apply or have been set at different levels where prices from sales of previous years are quoted. Exchange rates are those in effect on the day of sale.


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