Winston Churchill’s half-smoked cigar sold for £9k at auction
Winston Churchill’s four-inch Cuban cigar stub was rescued from an ashtray in 1947 by a British airman Corporal William Alan Turner, whose crew flew Churchill and his wife, and preserved it till today has sold for $12,000 ( £9,045) in an online auction. The wartime prime minister smoke the cigar at Paris’ Le Bourget airport in May 1947, after being awarded France’s highest military honour, the Meadille Militaire.
The label on the Cuban cigar included Churchill’s name and the item was accompanied with a signed photo which showed the prime minister with it in his hand. On the back of the photo the corporal wrote “ A Photograph I took from the doorway of York MW101 at Le Bourget Airport, Paris on 11th May 1947, just before we flew back to Northolt.
According to Boston based RR Auction the cigar was bought by an unnamed collector in Palm Beach, Florida.
In 2010, a Havana cigar he gave to a fellow diner at then Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo in 1963 was sold for £ 2, 125 and five years later, the chewed end of a cigar he smoked at a hospital in 1962 fetched £2000.