ONE of wartime Prime Minister Sir Winston Church-ill’s unsmoked cigars is part of a huge collection of the wartime leader’s memorabilia up for auction next month in London.

The 150 lots, expected to raise £1m on Thursday, June 3, includes wartime diaries and private letters written by Sir Winston, who was born at Blenheim Palace, in Woodstock, and is buried in Bladon churchyard.

St James’s auction house Christie’s said the collection, amas-sed over 30 years by Malcolm S Forbes Jr, the chief executive of US business magazine Forbes, was the most important and wide-ranging collection of its kind and casts fresh light on one of Oxfordshire’s greatest sons.

The star lot, expected to sell for up to £120,000 next month, is his Second World War diary, showing how he spent his time between September 1939 and June 1945.

He was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty after Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, then became Prime Minister in May 1940 after Germany invaded France and forced British forces back towards the Channel coast.

It details summit meetings with US President Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet leader Josef Stalin, weekly meetings with King George VI, and a trip to a football match at Wembley in October 1941.

Earlier memorabilia includes his account of the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan, in September 1898, in which Churchill fought as a young cavalryman.

In the letter, Churchill describes “the most dangerous two minutes I should live to see having been faced with an enemy of at the very least 40,000 men – five miles long with great humps and squares at intervals”.

Also up for auction is a telegraph sent by the Boer police to Johannesburg offering a description of Churchill while he was on the run during the Boer War.

Having vaulted the wall of a Boer prison camp, he had jumped aboard a moving train to rejoin the army and continue his work as a war correspondent for the Morning Post newspaper.

The telegram, expected to fetch up to £8,000, describes Churchill as an “Englishman 25 years old about 5 foot 8 inches tall, medium build, walks with a slight stoop.

“Pale features. Reddish-brown hair almost invisible small moustache.

“Speaks through his nose and cannot pronounce the letter S. Had last a brown suit on and cannot speak one word of Dutch.”

Other lots include a first edition of a Churchill book inscribed to Guy Burgess, later revealed as an infamous double agent and Soviet spy, and an unsmoked Havana cigar given to a friend in Monte Carlo in April 1963.

Christie’s director of books and manuscripts, Thomas Venning, said: “This outstanding collection presents an exceptional and fascinating insight into Churchill’s personality, character, sharp wit and his distinctive way with words, with letters, photographs and books spanning his entire life, from his first portrait photo as a baby to correspondence from his last years.”

Further auctions of Churchill memorabilia collected by Mr Forbes will be held in New York in December and in London next year.