William Cash meets a Devon farmer who keeps the family’s gruesome family heirloom — Hitler’s red telephone — in his safe
A week before Christmas the Grampian microphone that Sir Winston Churchill used to make his VE Day speech in Westminster Chapel went under the hammer at a specialist sale of historical documents at Ludlow Racecourse by the Shropshire auctioneers Mullock Madeley. The estimate was a fairly modest £700–£1,000.
The microphone — whose wooden plinth is engraved with the words ‘The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance’ — has a curious history. In the 1950s it was the star attraction at a famous London restaurant, but it then crossed the Atlantic and ended up in a tequila restaurant in New Mexico. For some reason the owner’s wife did not like it, and put it up for sale.
I made a bid of £1,000, thinking that it would make the perfect present for my Churchill-obsessed father — a Tory MP for more than 20 years whose own father, an MC, was killed in the war.
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