Lot 53
Keynes, John Maynard (1883-1946)
Typed letter signed to F. L. Lucas at Bletchley Park
Auction: 16 June 2026 from 10:00 BST
Description
21st October 1939, written on one side of a single sheet of King's College Cambridge stationery (23 x 18cm), addressed to Lucas (as ‘Peter’) at ‘Room 47, The Foreign Office, S. W. 1.' (the official address of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park), signed by Keynes using his initials JMK in black ink at foot, the letter discussing the recent publication of an unspecified work by George Bernard Shaw, and remarking that ‘the Foreign Office in which you dwell seems to be a strange place’.
Together with an autograph letter signed to F. L. Lucas, 18th October 1926, written on one side of a single sheet of King's College Cambridge stationery (18 x 11.5cm), ‘Dear Peter, I finished your book last night. I liked it very much. but perhaps chiefly because it was so very Peterish’, signed by Keynes with his initials (2)
Provenance
By direct descent from F. L. Lucas.
Footnote
Although one of the leading literary scholars of his generation, F. L. Lucas was in later life wont to remark that he valued more highly his contributions in the two world wars. He saw active service in the first, and during the second was employed in the Ultra project at Bletchley Park, where he was ‘a central figure in hut 3, which produced intelligence reports from the Enigma decodes of German army and Luftwaffe high-grade ciphers. The value of his work there was recognized in 1946 by his appointment as OBE’ (ODNB). The book which Keynes mentions in the autograph letter dated 1926 may Lucas's semi-autobiographical novel The River Flows, or his noted work of criticism Authors Dead and Living, both of which were published that year. Lucas and Keynes, both Cambridge Apostles, fellows of King's College, and world-class intellectuals at the centre of the nation's intellectual life, were lifelong friends, and Keynes was the dedicatee of what many considered to be Lucas's magnum opus, his 1927 edition of John Webster.