A. P. Wavell - Other Men’s Flowers - High-Command Copy Given by General Sir Bertie Fisher to Air Marshal Lord Portal

WAVELL, A. P. Other Men’s Flowers. An Anthology of Poetry compiled by A. P. Wavell. London: Jonathan Cape, 1944.

First edition, second impression. First published March 1944; second impression May 1944.

Octavo. Original red cloth, spine lettered and decorated in gilt. Printed on war economy paper, with the Book Production War Economy Standard device to the copyright page. Dedication leaf “To my son”, title-page with Wavell’s full honours beneath his name, and contents arranged under Wavell’s own headings, including “Music, Mystery and Magic”, “Good Fighting”, “Love and All That”, “Conversation Pieces”, “The Sky and the Sea”, and “Last Post”.

A very good copy. Spine faded, as usual, with the gilt still legible, boards lightly handled and rubbed, contents clean with the expected light toning to the wartime paper. No dust jacket.

Inscribed on the front free endpaper in blue ink: “C. Portal from B.F. 21/5/44.” The provenance has been confirmed by the family of Charles Portal, identifying this as Portal’s own copy and confirming that “B.F.” is Lieutenant-General Sir Bertie Fisher. The date, 21 May 1944, is Portal’s birthday, making this a particularly attractive wartime presentation from one senior commander to another.

A superb high-command association copy of Wavell’s celebrated wartime anthology.

The connection between Wavell, Fisher and Portal is unusually strong. Wavell was one of Britain’s most prominent soldier-statesmen of the war: Commander-in-Chief Middle East, Commander-in-Chief India, Supreme Commander of the short-lived ABDA Command, and from 1943 Viceroy of India. Portal, meanwhile, was Chief of the Air Staff from October 1940 through the decisive years of the war, and one of the principal architects of Britain’s air strategy. Fisher belonged to the same senior military world: a Lieutenant-General, former Commandant of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and GOC-in-C Southern Command at the beginning of the Second World War. He also had an early aviation connection, having learned to fly before the First World War and later serving in military aviation administration.

This is therefore a copy of a book compiled by a Field Marshal, given by a Lieutenant-General, to the wartime Chief of the Air Staff. The presentation is not decorative or incidental: it sits exactly within the world from which the book emerged.

Other Men’s Flowers was published in 1944 and became one of the best-loved poetry anthologies of the wartime generation. Its title is taken from Montaigne: “I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.” Wavell’s selections reveal a soldier’s private canon: martial, elegiac, romantic, stoical, humorous and deeply literary. It is an anthology shaped by memory, command, endurance and consolation.

The association with Portal is especially evocative. In May 1944, when this copy was given, Portal was at the centre of Allied air planning in the final weeks before D-Day. To find Wavell’s anthology of courage, loss, poetry and remembrance in Portal’s own wartime library, presented to him on his birthday by another senior soldier, gives the book a resonance far beyond that of an ordinary copy.

A distinguished wartime association copy, directly confirmed by family provenance, linking three senior British commanders: Wavell, Fisher and Portal.