The Guardian

London, February 26

Every politician can expect to be consigned to history’s metaphorical rubbish bin one day, but

Winston Churchill probably didn’t expect to end up in a real one quite so soon.

Still, it may come as some consolation to the family to know that a rare Churchill photo album found in an east London rubbish bin 20 years ago is expected to fetch up to £10,000 at auction next week.

The album is being sold by the widow of a London journalist who is thought to have rescued it from a bin when his paper, the Daily Telegraph, moved premises in the 1980s.

It contains 150 black and white press pictures of Churchill taken between 1908

and 1915, charting his time as president of the board of trade, home secretary and first lord of the admiralty in Lord Asquith’s Liberal government.

One of the hand-captioned images, titled Paying My Fare, showds a top-hatted Churchill settling up with a grinning taxi driver. Another shows his son Randolph as a page at the wedding of Lord Asquith’s daughter Violet. A third — An Enjoyable Smoke — has him wearing a trilby and relaxing with a slightly smaller version of his trademark cigar.

The most intriguing photograph, however, bears the simple caption: Aberdeen — Attempted Molestation by a Suffragette, 1912. It shows a policeman and another official trying to protect an oblivious Churchill as a woman lunges at him from behind.

The photographs are in a battered 1920s cloth album that bears the stamp The Right Honourable Winston Churchill, Chartwell Manor, Westerham.

“They’re like hen’s teeth,” said Chris Albury, an expert at Dominic Winter Book Auctions,

the UK auction house handling the sale.

“Most images of Churchill are of wartime with his cigar, so pictures from this date are more unusual and very desirable. I’ve never seen so many such good pictures of the younger Winston Churchill.” Museums and private collectors are expected to be among its bidders.