VINTAGE \"Minister of Information\" Duff Cooper Signed Envelope Dated 1939 For Sale

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VINTAGE \"Minister of Information\" Duff Cooper Signed Envelope Dated 1939:
$129.99

Up for sale a RARE VINTAGE! "Minister of Information" Duff Cooper Hand Signed envelope cancelled on 3 seperate historical dates. The dates are the following; November 11, 1938 (Armistice Day), December 25, 1938 (Christmas Day) and January 1, 1939 (New Years Day). 

ES-4343

Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount 1890 – 1 January 1954), known as Duff Cooper, was a

British Conservative Party politician,

diplomat and military and political historian. In the intense political debates

of the late 1930s over appeasement, he first put his trust in

the League of Nations, and

later realised that war with Germany was inevitable. He denounced the Munich agreement of 1938 as meaningless, cowardly, and

unworkable, as he resigned from the cabinet. When Winston Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, he

named Cooper as Minister of

Information. From 1941, he served in numerous diplomatic roles. His

most important role was representative to Charles de Gaulle's Free France (1943–44) and ambassador to France from

1944–48. Duff Cooper (he was always known as “Duff” rather than “Alfred”) was

born at Cavendish Square on

22 February 1890. He was the only son of fashionable

society doctor Sir Alfred Cooper (1843–1908),

a surgeon and specialist in the sexual problems of the upper classes, and Lady

Agnes Duff, daughter of James Duff, 5th Earl Fife.

She had already eloped with two husbands, the first of whom she deserted and

the second of whom died, before marrying Cooper in 1882. Duff Cooper had three

older sisters. He had royal connections: his maternal uncle, the first Duke of Fife,

was married to Louise, Princess Royal.

Cooper enjoyed a typical gentleman's upbringing of country estates and London

society. He attended two prep schools, including Wixenford School. He was unhappy at prep school, but was then

very happy at Eton College. One of his maternal

great-grandmothers was Lady Elizabeth FitzClarence, an

illegitimate daughter of King William IV who

fathered eight children with Dorothea Jordan. Within weeks Cooper was selected for the

winnable seat of Oldham,

where he was elected at the General

Election in October 1924, with a 13,000 majority over the sitting

Labour member. He made a very successful maiden speech on Egypt, which was

praised by H. A. L. Fisher who

spoke next. He was seen as a coming man, along with Eden and Macmillan (who was

then regarded as a man with a future, unlike in the 1930s). Cooper was a

stalwart supporter of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and a friend of Chancellor of the

Exchequer, Winston Churchill. In January 1928 he was appointed Financial

Secretary to the War Office, not a job he would have chosen. The

Secretary of State Sir Laming Worthington-Evans gave

him a lot of responsibility. He very likely would have been promoted if the

Conservatives had won the election in

1929, but they were defeated and Cooper lost his own seat.

John Julius, his only

legitimate child, was born in 1929.  Out

of Parliament he wrote a short biography of the French statesman Talleyrand.

He wrote slowly but seldom needed to revise his drafts. Philip Ziegler writes that “rarely can subject and author

have been more satisfactorily matched” as both men were worldly and disliked

cant. The book was eventually published

in 1932 by his nephew Rupert Hart-Davis to critical praise and lasting success.

In November 1935, after the General

Election, Cooper was promoted to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for War.

He was appointed to the Privy Council. During the Abdication Crisis he was sympathetic to Edward VIII and

to the possibility of a morganatic marriage, and in vain advised him to wait

until after his coronation (due in 1937) before picking a fight with the

government over his plans to marry Wallis Simpson. He

felt out of kilter with the Conservative leadership and was surprised when the

new Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appointed him First Lord

of the Admiralty in May 1937. Philip Ziegler writes that his

tenure of office was “an unequivocal success”. He enjoyed high living on board

the Admiralty yacht HMS Enchantress, but

fought Chamberlain and the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon for

more spending on the Royal Navy. Chamberlain saw him as indiscreet and as a

firebrand; by the time of the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler Cooper was isolated in the Cabinet as the

most public critic of Chamberlain's appeasement policy. On

3 October 1938, a few days after the Munich Agreement, he denounced it and

resigned from the Cabinet. On doing so he said, "War with honour or

peace with dishonour," he might have been persuaded to accept, "but

war with dishonour—that was too much." Fellow appeasement-critic and

Conservative Party MP Vyvyan Adams described

Cooper's actions as "the first step in the road back to national

sanity." As a backbencher he joined the coterie around Anthony Eden (who had resigned as Foreign Secretary in

February 1938), but made only muted criticisms of the Government. His main

source of income was writing articles for the Evening Standard. He

argued for an Anglo-French alliance.

VINTAGE "Minister of Information" Duff Cooper Signed Envelope Dated 1939

$129.99

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