About this Item
This is an intriguing, early Second World War letter from then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston S. Churchill to his one-time ghostwriter, A. Marshall Diston. The typed letter dated "7th October 1939" on blind embossed Admiralty stationery features Churchill s autograph salutation, valediction, and signature. The text reads: "I am very sorry indeed to hear your news, | the more so as I do not know what I can do to help. | Thank you very much however for writing to me." Churchill s autograph salutation is "Dear Mr. Diston" and he signed "Winston S. Churchill" after his autograph valediction. Accompanying the letter is the original, franked Admiralty envelope (insignia on the flap) addressed to Diston. Condition of the letter is fine, clean, complete, and unsoiled with folds consonant with the original franked envelope, which is moderately soiled and slit along the top edge. The letter and envelope are housed in a removable, archival mylar sleeve within a rigid, crimson cloth folder.Churchill had returned to the Admiralty just a month earlier, after the invasion of Poland and the beginning of the Second World War. Seven months later he became wartime Prime Minister. While Diston s dilemma and request is unknown, what makes this letter so very interesting is both the controversial nature of Churchill s relationship with Diston and the letter s clearly distancing tone. Adam Marshall Diston (1893-1956) was a WWI veteran, journalist, and unsuccessful candidate for Parliament in the 1930s under the banner of the fascist-leaning New Party of Sir Oswald Mosley. Towards the end of 1933, Churchill, who churned out a massive number of periodical articles during the 1930s, embarked on a process of cannibalizing material from his old articles to create new ones. Diston was engaged as a literary assistant for this purpose, but the process devolved to ghost writing. According to Frederick Woods, at least 16 published articles credited to Churchill between early 1934 and late 1938 were "wholly or partly written by Diston" with the stated possibility of "considerably more." (Artillery of Words, pp.165-6) Among the articles Diston wrote for Churchill was an unpublished 1937 piece entitled "How the Jews Can Combat Persecution." The article expressed some distinctly insensitive and even anti-Semitic sentiments, including specious apologia for racist cant. Jews are characterized as ".partly responsible for the antagonism from which they suffer" due the fact that "the Jew. looks different. thinks differently. refuses to be absorbed." The article does end with a declaration that "The Jews are suffering from persecutions as cruel, as relentless and as vindictive as any in their long history" and the exhortation that "to attempt his succour becomes a sacred duty." Nonetheless, this does not excuse the tone, unpardonable then and resonating ever more harshly over time. Many statements from the 1930s echo thus. But Churchill did not write these words. Churchill instructed Diston to include four things in the article, none of which could be plausibly twisted to imply racism. In fact, Churchill's fourth item was a clear statement, consistent with his longstanding support of both Jews and Zionism, that it "is a perfectly legitimate use by the Jews of their influence throughout the world to bring pressure, economic and financial, to bear upon the Governments which persecute them." In 1982, Churchill's Official Biographer Martin Gilbert published a letter from Diston definitively proving that the article was authored entirely by Diston. Moreover, Churchill's original instructions to Diston clarify that the offensive content was neither directed nor framed by Churchill. Nonetheless, in 2007 Professor Richard Toye made news by alleging "discovery" of the unpublished article, crediting it to Churchill, thereby instigating a brief media storm and revisionist interpretations of Churchill's extensive public record in support of both Jews and Zionism.
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