Captain Stormont Gibbs, M.C.
William Kimber.
1986.
Hardcover.
206 pp., photos, maps, appendix, glossary, index, 8vo; very well compiled account from the diaries and reminiscences of Captain Gibbs who served with the 4th Suffolk's on the Somme, at Arras and Passchendaele in the final retreat of 1918. This copy is signed on the title page in flourishing ink hands, by the editor and by Enoch Powell who wrote the foreword. Richard Deonald-Lewis, the editor, has also written a dedication to the proof reader, Betty Crockett: "To Betty, with very many thanks for all your hard work to make this book possible". Enoch Powell was an extremly contentious politician and Memeber of Parliament, most notorious for his Rivers of Blood speech on immigration that he made in 1968. Powell had never experienced military combat and felt guilty for having survived WW2, writing that soldiers who did so carried "a sort of shame with them to the grave" and referring to the Second Battle of El Alamein as a "separating flame" between the living and the dead. When once asked how he would like to be remembered, he at first answered, "Others will remember me as they will remember me", but when pressed he replied, "I should like to have been killed in the war". In 1986, when he signed this book, Powell had contoversially stated that the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) had not killed Airey Neave but that "MI6 and their friends" were responsible, Powell citing as his sources for such an astonishing accusation by a British parliamentarian information that had been disclosed to him from within the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Powell died in 1998, when former Prime Minister Tony Blair said "he was one of the great figures of 20th-century British politics, gifted with a brilliant mind. However much we disagreed with many of his views, there was no doubting the strength of his convictions or their sincerity, or his tenacity in pursuing them, regardless of his own political self-interest." Pat Doyle Cover Art (illustrator). Pictorial dust jacket in very good condition and with little shelf wear to it. Not price clipped. Contents very clean with several black and white photographs throughout. Edges clean. Tight binding. Overall very good.