Winston Churchill Sends a Signed Photograph to the Young Daughter of a British Jewish Leader

The courtship of Winston Churchill and Clementine Hozier was a brief one. Their engagement was announced on August 15, 1908, and the wedding set for less than a month later on September 12. Friends and relatives offered congratulations, and some sent wedding gifts.

At the turn of the 20th century, Nathan Laski was a cotton merchant, a Manchester magistrate, and a leader of the Liberal Party. He was also the most prominent Jewish leader in England. In 1904 he pledged his support for the bid of Churchill (then a Liberal) to become MP for North West Manchester. Churchill won the election, and Laski became a life-long friend. It was at one of Laski’s dinners that Churchill and Weizmann first met. Laski had a son Harold, a political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer, who became active in politics and would serve as the Chairman of the Labour Party for a time while Churchill was Prime Minister. Laski also had a daughter Mabel who, according to the British census records, was 13 years old in 1908. She wrote Churchill with her congratulations and sending a gift, and he warmly responded on August 29, 1908.

A postcard photograph of Churchill circa 1908, when he entered the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, inscribed and signed to Mabel Laski. On the back she has rather poignantly written of the 33 year old Churchill, “My Liberal friend”. The photograph was originally sent with the letter, thus dating it exactly.

This is the only signed photograph of Churchill that we have ever seen definitively inscribed to a child, and a scarce one that can be so precisely dated.