A pair of Winston Churchill’s glasses will auction later this month, when they are expected to realise as much as £45,000.
The reading glasses are listed at Invaluable, by Just Collecting Auctions, who have put a £40,000 to £45,000 estimate on them and ask for a £20,000 opening bid in a sale due to close on June 24.
They descrive the sale as “an extraordinary and not-to-be-missed opportunity to own one of the most characteristic and personal Churchill items ever to come to market.”
According to the site, Churchill owned the spectacles during his second term as Prime Minister around 1954 to 1955.
Churchill’s glasses were discovered in their maker’s archives after his death. The dots on the frame told Churchill which glasses to pick up. Image courtesy of Just Collecting Auctions.
They were made specially for him at C W Dixey & Son in tortoiseshell in their Model 1805 frame style. He had white dots applied to the temples of the frame in a code that told him which glasses were for which purposes.
This pair were his readers. And, after Churchill had returned them to the makers for repairs he neglected to have them returned.
They were discovered in the store’s stores after his death in 1965.
They are being sold with a typed, signed note of provenance from the company’s former director J R A Gibson. And their original case.
Winston Churchill remains an extremely popular figure with the British public and is one of the most collectible figures in the world.
His false teeth have been sold, even cigar butts he stubbed out, alongside more conventional memorabilia like autographs and papers.
The most valuable Churchill item ever sold is one of his paintings, Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque (painted in 1943), a scene from Marrakech that made headlines in 2021 when actress Angelina Jolie sold it at Christie’s for a record £8.2 million ($11.5 million).
Churchill’s reading glasses are listed now at Invaluable, Just Collecting Auctions.
