Purchase of the Churchill papers (CHAR) by the Heritage Lottery Fund

In April 1995, grants from the National Heritage Lottery Fund and the John Paul Getty Foundation enabled the Chartwell Papers to be bought from the Chartwell Trust and consolidated the ownership of all the Papers in a charitable trust, the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust. The papers will be held in perpetuity at Churchill Archives Centre.

Before the papers arrived at the Archives Centre, they were previously held at the house of Churchill’s son, Randolph Churchill, at Stour, East Bergholt, Suffolk while he worked on the official biography of his father.

When Randolph died in 1968 the Chartwell Papers were transferred to the Bodleian Library, Oxford where Martin Gilbert continued work on the official biography.