CHURCHILL (WINSTON)Autograph letter signed ('Winston S. Churchill') to 'Dear Sandys', apologising for missing him and advising he is about to sail for the Cape on the 14th ('...the actual fighting will begin before the week is out and may be over before the main army arrives...'), and hoping to meet him again, one page on a bifolium, dust-staining and marks, creased at folds, 8vo (200 x 130mm.), Great Cumberland Place, W., 10 October 1899Footnotes:'THE ACTUAL FIGHTING WILL BEGIN BEFORE THE WEEK IS OUT': A YOUNG CHURCHILL ON HIS WAY TO THE BOER WAR.Churchill writes as he makes preparations to embark as a journalist to report on the Boer War: '...he paid for the repair of his telescope and field glasses and bought a compass. He also arranged for the despatch to the boat of eighteen bottles of whisky and twelve bottles of lime juice...' (Martin Gilbert, Churchill, A Life, 2000, p.106). As he predicts in our letter, the first shots of the war were fired before the week was out on October 12th, and he sailed for Cape Town two days later. Whilst his hopes to take a film camera had been dashed by American rivals, he had negotiated a lucrative contract with the Morning Post, which made him the highest paid war correspondent of the day. On his way to the front just two weeks later, he was accompanying an armoured train on a reconnaissance mission in Natal when the train was ambushed. He was captured and interned in Pretoria. His daring escape from the POW camp on 12 December and his subsequent exploits, described in his despatches and published as London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton's March in 1900, made him a household name and laid the foundations for his political career. The recipient of this early letter is probably George John Sandys (1875-1937), later M.P. for Wells. He served in the second Boer War with the Glamorgan Yeomanry, the 5th Dragoon Guards and the 2nd Life Guards. Whilst with the British Expeditionary Force in the First World War he was wounded at Ypres. Sandys' son, Duncan, was to marry Churchill's eldest daughter Diana in 1935.