Sotheby?s London, April 26 2017

Sold for £162,500

Back in 1999 I was despatched by the Sunday Telegraph to the Kentish village of St Mary Cray to report on farmer Frank Quay?s decision to sell a 1954 Land Rover that he had acquired 26 years earlier for £320 and which was originally owned by wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill.
Quay?s attempt to shift the battered relic for £30,000 in a Sotheby?s internet sale failed, however, so he hung on to it until 2012 – when it crossed the block at auction house Cheffins for £129,000.
Message: ?Churchilliana? has become both highly collectable and can be extremely valuable – so it came as little surprise to see this rather lovely, 1946 Lemania chronograph with a solid Churchill connection soar to almost seven times its high estimate. According to Sotheby?s catalogue note, the yellow gold chronograph (which would ordinarily be worth around £10,000) was given to Churchill following a three-week stay at the Villa de Choisi in the Swiss village of Bursinel, a property owned by banker Alfred Kern.
As well as indulging in his passion for oil painting while at the villa, Churchill is also said to have written the speech he gave at the University of Zurich on September 19 in which he proposed ?a kind of United States of Europe?. 
Around a week beforehand, he made an official visit to Lausanne, and it was then that the government of the canton of Vaud presented him with the watch which had been engraved on the ba...