Winston Churchill's 14 October 1950 Speech to the 71st Annual Conservative Party Conference published in the Report of the Proceedings

London: National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, 1950. 1st Edition. Paperback. This booklet contains the first printed appearance of Churchill's speech of 14 October 1950 at the 71st Annual Conservative Party Conference. Five years earlier, Churchill's Conservatives had been soundly defeated in the General Election at the end of the war. Churchill would head opposition to the Labour Government until the General Election of 1951, which returned the Conservatives to majority and Churchill to the office of Prime Minister.

At the 71st Annual Conservative Party Conference, Churchill addressed a mass meeting of more than 5,000 representatives in the Empress Ballroom, Winter Gardens, Blackpool, at the conclusion of the Conference on Saturday, 14 Ocober, at 2:30 PM. This address appears at pp.107-113 of this 116-page "Verbatim Report of the Proceedings together with the Text of Mr. Churchill's Speech". In introducing Churchill, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe concluded: "Mr. Churchill can have no personal ambition left to satisfy. We in this hall have one ambition which we hope and believe he will satisfy for us, and that is to lead his Party to victory at the polls". This Churchill accomplished the following year.

The booklet measures 9.75 inches x 6 inches and is bound in green card wraps. Condition is very good. The paper wraps remain bright, complete, and firmly attached with almost no wear, though there is a pronounced forward lean to the binding and a single name inked to the upper front cover. Laid inside the front cover we found a 3.5 x 4 inch printed Compliments card reading "Maldon Division Conservative Association / With Compliments / Robert G. Stevenson / Agent & Secretary / Central Office / Constitutional Club / Witham, Essex." The contents of the booklet remain bright and clean. The sole interior markings we find are underlining to five lines regarding communism in Churchill's speech, at p.109. The speech herein was later printed in In the Balance at pp.389-402 under the title "Conservative Annual Conference" and later still in Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, Vol. VIII, pp.8096-8106 under the title "Situation at Home and Abroad".

Reference: Cohen D138, Woods D(b)78(a)