Description
The first edition of Guns Or Butter by R.H. Bruce Lockhart, inscribed to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on the day the Munich Agreement was signed.
Octavo, [8], 382pp, [2]. Blue cloth, title stamped in gilt on the spine. The first issue, with “First Published October, 1938” on the copyright page. Light foxing to leafends and title page. Illustrated endpapers. In the publisher’s scarce dust jacket, “10s.6d. net” retail price on the front flap, light soiling and spotting to panels, a near fine example.
This copy is inscribed on the title page the month before publication: “For Mr. Neville Chamberlain / in admiration / R.H. Bruce Lockhart / 30 Sept. 1938.”
The Munich Agreement, signed on September 30, 1938, conceded the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler in an effort to avoid war. It was negotiated by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Édouard Daladier, was hailed briefly as “peace for our time,” but quickly came to be seen as a failed act of appeasement that encouraged further German aggression.
The author of this work, R. H. Bruce Lockhart was a British diplomat and intelligence operative. During World War I, he was arrested in Russia by the Bolsheviks in the wake of the so-called “Lockhart Plot,” a plot to kill Lenin before he took power. During WWII, he served as Director-General of the Political Warfare Executive. In that position, he oversaw covert broadcasts, psychological operations, and black propaganda aimed at undermining Axis morale and supporting resistance movements in occupied Europe.
In his follow-up book, titled “Comes The Reckoning” (1947), Lockhart describes Chamberlain as “…not the weak man that the public imaged him to be. Indeed, apart from Mr. Churchill, he was the strongest personality in the cabinet. [His failing] was that he was guided by principles of moral rectitude.”
