BROPHY, John. Britain’s Home Guard: A Character Study. Portrayed in colour by Eric Kennington. With a foreword by Sir James Grigg. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1945.
First edition, first impression, in the original dust jacket, inscribed by the artist on the front free endpaper: “To Sir Charles Portal from Eric Kennington 1945.”
A superb high-command presentation copy, linking one of Britain’s greatest war artists with the wartime Chief of the Air Staff. Eric Kennington had been an official war artist in both world wars, renowned for his forceful portraits of servicemen and civilians under strain. His Second World War work included RAF portraits and Home Guard subjects, and the Imperial War Museum holds his Members of a Home Guard Ack-Ack Gun Team, September 1943.
This book is Kennington’s visual tribute to the men of the Home Guard: part-time soldiers, factory workers, clerks, veterans, miners, coast defence gunners, searchlight men and anti-aircraft crews, portrayed not as comic amateurs but as a citizen army. John Brophy was himself a soldier-writer and served in the Home Guard during the Second World War, making the text more than detached commentary.
The Portal association is exceptional. In 1945 Sir Charles Portal stood at the summit of British air power, and Kennington’s presentation to him brings together the air war and the home front: the commander of the RAF receiving an artist’s record of the civilian defence force that guarded Britain’s towns, factories, coasts and anti-aircraft positions while the RAF fought overhead. The inscription turns a scarce illustrated Home Guard book into a direct wartime association copy.
Original red cloth, with colour frontispiece and full-page colour portraits by Kennington. Dust jacket with light chipping, edge wear, small closed tears, creasing and minor marking, but complete and highly presentable. Contents clean and bright. A very good copy with a magnificent presentation association.
