Thank you so much for getting in touch: we know very little about the Biggin Hill speech, so it’s really interesting to know that there was at least one other copy besides the one presented to Churchill – was your father in law one of the officers there? And your photos sound interesting too – we do have one photo of Churchill opening a Churchill Court at the British Legion home in Sevenoaks, but that’s 12 October 1946, so yours probably come from a different event.
Katharine

I have Churchill’s lunch speech to officers 18/6/51 at Biggin Hill (2 78′s – 4 sides) Belding and Bennett. It is almost identical to the copy you show in the photo above. So, there is at least one other copy in existence! We also have a collection of photographs which look to be Press Agency. Some include an event on 14/10/46 when Churchill was presented Kippington Court for the British Legion. We have these from our family archives, as my father in law was present at some of the events. Please contact me if these would be of interest, Maxine

No, as far as we know, they’ve hardly been used at all (and up until a year ago, were sitting in Churchill’s old record cabinet, as they had done for the last forty years).

Katharine

Cheers

Mark Burman
Producer

Thanks for getting in touch: we do have several different sets of Churchill speeches on record (including a 7 volume set called “The Progress of the War” and another 11 volume set, both in our Additional Churchill collection, http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0014%2FWCHL), but it would be interesting to know if yours are the same.

Katharine

I have a boxed set of all the speeches both written and recorded onto 78′s can’t recall the title, but will look it out.

Would you be interested in them?

Phil