He has nothing to offer but blood

ALMOST anything linked to Winston Churchill can be collectible, down to the butts of his cigars. But it is hard to imagine an artefact rarer or more intimate than the one scheduled to be auctioned on March 12: a vial of his blood.

The sample, long since turned from red to amber, was collected in 1962 by Patricia Fitzgibbon, a student nurse at Middlesex Hospital in London, where Churchill was being treated for a hip injury. The vial was supposed to be discarded after his stay, but Fitzgibbon got permission to keep it, according to a statement by Duke’s Auctioneers, which is organising the sale.

Fitzgibbon kept the vial, which is 7cm long and labelled “Sir Winston S Churchill WWB9” in black ink, until before her death, when she entrusted it to a friend who decided to sell it this year, the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death.

The auction house said it had attracted interest. The question is how to put a price on it.

The market value of the vial “is a very difficult thing to estimate”, said Timothy Medhurst, an auctioneer and appraiser at Duke’s. He noted that Churchill’s cigar butts have been known to change hands for £500 (about R8 900), but the blood sample “is the closest you can get to Churchill”.

“There is nothing to guide it, because nothing like it has ever come up to auction,” Medhurst said, calling the vial “the most poignant and unique memorabilia we’ve had”.

Churchill fractured his hip falling out of bed on holiday in Monte Carlo in 1962. He was flown to London on a Royal Air Force plane for treatment and spent several weeks at the hospital, recuperating and bedevilling the staff.

“I remember he would never settle at night until after he had read the first edition of all the daily newspapers which he had specially delivered,” Fitzgibbon said in an interview in 2010, according to the auction house. “He habitually smoked cigars in bed.” Churchill’s recovery was slow, hampered by bronchitis and pneumonia, which developed into thrombosis. He died three years later, in 1965, at the age of 90. — NYTimes.com