LONDON (AP) – Sotheby’s auction house is selling art, books, furniture and a humidor owned by a well-known Briton who traveled the world on high-level diplomatic missions during World War II, met Roosevelt and Stalin and loved a good cigar.
No, it’s not wartime leader Winston Churchill but his daughter, Mary Soames.
The auction of her artworks and artifacts on Wednesday offers an unusually personal look at her father and a pivotal moment in history.
“They are little slices of history,” said Frances Christie, head of modern and postwar British art at Sotheby’s, holding a silver coffee pot given to Churchill as a birthday present from his War Cabinet colleagues in 1942 to commemorate the crucial British victory at El Alamein.
Mary, who died in May aged 91, kept the coffee pot in her London home, along with other mementoes, after her father’s death in 1965.