Newcastle woman to auction Winston Churchill’s cigar butt

Mar 18 2010 by Tony Henderson, The Journal

A TYNESIDE trooper’s eye for a Churchillian cast off could mean a cash windfall for his family.

John Turnbull, from Elswick in Newcastle, joined the Coldstream Guards at the outbreak of the Second World War.

His diary notes that while on guard duty at the Prime Minister’s Chequers home in 1940 he picked up the discarded butt of one of Winston Churchill’s cigars.

Now the butt is to be auctioned by Anderson & Garland in Newcastle next Wednesday and is expected to fetch between £200 and £300.

The keepsake had been handed down to John’s son, also John, whose birth in 1941 is also recorded in the guardsman’s diary.

Now, Ann Sutherland, John Turnbull’s granddaughter who lives in Kenton Lane in Newcastle, is selling the smoking souvenir.

After the war, John opened grocery shops on Newcastle’s Scotswood Road.

Ann said of her late grandfather: “He was a gentleman and a lovely man. I have known about the cigar all my life. I don’t know why anyone would think of picking up a cigar butt, but I am pleased he did.”

Ann decided to put the butt up for sale after a cigar Churchill left unfinished in 1941 sold for £4,500 at an auction in Norfolk on January 29.

He left the cigar to attend a Cabinet meeting and it was picked up by Downing Street valet Nellie Goble, who sent it to a friend with a sheet a sheet of number 10 notepaper, on which she wrote: “Just a small souvenir to remind you at some future date of one of the greatest men that ever lived in England.”