HAWTHORN

The distinguished wartime career of George Patrick John Rushworth Jellicoe (1918-2007), 2nd Earl Jellicoe, is well described in Loma Almonds' 'A British Achilles' (2006). However Jellicoe, who commanded the Special Boat Section from 1943 to the end of the war, was not always blessed with success. The present collection of eighteen documents constitutes Jellicoe's own file on what Almonds describes as a 'shambles': an attempted series of sabotage attacks on six Sardinian airfields in the run-up to the allied invasion of Sicily.

Both photographs in black and white, and both 25.5 x 20.5 cm. One landscape and the other portrait. The two in good condition, showing light signs of age and wear. Both clearly taken at the same event, as in both Hawthorn wears the same suit. Both taken indoors. In the first (portrait) he is seen cutting a ribbon, while a group of smartly-dressed men and women look on approvingly behind him. Signs for 'Silver Exide' and 'Mobilgas Special' are mounted on a wall.

3pp., 12mo. A fair copy. Very good, on lightly-aged paper. The twenty-eight-line poem is arranged in seven four-line stanzas, with Hillard's firm signature and the date at the end. The poem begins with unintentional, but no less curious, sexual overtones: 'The rod of Aaron, severed long | From its ancestral bowers, | Felt in its veins the sap of youth, | And shone with buds of flowers. | The rigid staff, smoothworn and dry, | In living green was dressed.