Winston Churchill

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Template:Redirect {{Infobox PM

| name=The Rt. Hon. Sir Winston Churchill
| image=Winston Churchill.jpg
| country=the United Kingdom
| term=10 May 194027 July 1945
26 October 19517 April 1955 | before=Neville Chamberlain
Clement Attlee | after=Clement Attlee
Sir Anthony Eden | date_birth=30 November 1874 | place_birth=Blenheim Palace, Woodstock,
Oxfordshire | date_death=24 January 1965 | place_death=Hyde Park Gate, London | party=Conservative and Liberal

}} Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, PC (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British politician, best known as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. At various times a soldier, journalist, author, painter, and politician, Churchill is generally regarded as one of the most important leaders in modern British and world history. He won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature. In a poll conducted by the BBC in 2002 to identify the "100 Greatest Britons", participants voted Churchill as the most important of all.

Churchill's legal surname was Spencer-Churchill (he is related to the distinguished Spencer family), but starting with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, his branch of the family used the name Churchill in public life.


Early life

Winston Churchill was a descendant of the first famous member of the Churchill family, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Winston's politician father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was the third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough; Winston's mother was Lady Randolph Churchill (née Jennie Jerome), daughter of American millionaire Leonard Jerome.

Winston Churchill was born in Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Oxfordshire; he arrived unexpectedly early when his mother was attending a ball. As was typical for upper-class boys at that time, he spent much of his childhood at boarding schools. He sat the entrance exam for Harrow School, but, famously, on confronting the Latin paper, carefully wrote the title, his name, and the number 1 followed by a dot, and could not think of anything else to write. He was accepted despite this, but placed in the bottom division where they were primarily taught English, at which he excelled. Today, this famous ancient public school offers an annual Churchill essay-prize on a subject chosen by the head of the English department.

He was rarely visited by his mother (then known as Lady Randolph), whom he virtually worshipped, despite his letters begging her to either come or let his father permit him to come home. She had a strong personality, and during her marriage to Lord Randolph she was involved in numerous affairs with powerful men of the day, most with her husband's knowledge. In later years, after Winston reached adulthood, he and his mother became closer, developing a kinship almost more like a brother and a sister than son and mother, coupled by a strong friendship.

He followed his father's career keenly but had a distant relationship with him. Once, in 1886, he is reported to have proclaimed "My daddy is Chancellor of the Exchequer and one day that's what I'm going to be." His desolate, lonely childhood stayed with him throughout his life. On the other hand, as a child he was very close to his nurse, Elizabeth Anne Everest (who would be known now as a nanny), and was deeply saddened when she died on July 3, 1895. He paid for her gravestone at the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium.

Churchill did badly at Harrow, regularly being punished for poor work and lack of effort. His nature was independent and rebellious and he failed to achieve much academically, failing some of the same courses numerous times and refusing to study the classics (that is, Latin and Ancient Greek). Despite this, he showed great ability in other areas such as mathematics and history, in both of which he was sometimes top of his class. The view of Churchill as a failure at school is one which he himself propagated, probably due to his father's intense dislike of the young Winston and his obvious readiness to label his son a disappointment. He did, however, become the school's fencing champion.

The Army

Churchill attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Upon his graduation at age 20, Churchill joined the army as a Subaltern of the IV (Queen's Own) Hussars Cavalry regiment. This regiment was stationed in Bangalore, India. On arriving in India, Churchill dislocated his shoulder while reaching from his boat for a chain on the dock and being thrown against the quay. This shoulder gave him trouble in later years, occasionally dislocating from its socket.

In India the main occupation of Churchill's regiment was polo, a situation which did not appeal to the young man, hungry for more military action. He devoted his time to educating himself from books which he had sent out. The Bangalore Club, of which he was a member, has records (which they display to visitors) showing that Winston Churchill failed to pay dues of 13 rupees, due to 'financial penury', a debt they believe to be still outstanding [1].

While stationed in India, he began to seek out wars. In 1895 he and Reggie Barnes obtained leave to travel to Cuba to observe the Spanish battles against Cuban guerrillas. Churchill also obtained a commission to write about the conflict from the Daily Graphic newspaper. To Churchill's delight he came under fire for the first time on his twenty-first birthday. On his way to Cuba he also made his first visit to the United States, being introduced to New York society by one of his mother's lovers, Bourke Cockran. In 1897 Churchill attempted to travel to the Greco-Turkish War but this conflict effectively ended before he could arrive. He therefore continued on to England on leave before hearing of the Pathan revolt on the North West Frontier and rushing back to India to participate in the campaign to put it down.

Churchill had previously obtained a promise from Sir Bindon Blood, the commander of this expedition, that if he were to command again Churchill could accompany him. He wasted no time in reminding Blood of his promise and was able to participate in the six-week campaign, also writing articles for the newspapers The Pioneer and The Daily Telegraph at £5 an article. By October 1897 Churchill was back in Britain and his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, on that campaign, was published in December.

While still officially stationed in India, and having obtained a long period of leave, Churchill attempted to get himself assigned to the army being put together and commanded by Lord Kitchener and intended to achieve the reconquest of the Sudan. Kitchener was opposed to having Churchill on the staff, feeling he should be back with his regiment in India, but Churchill pulled a great many strings to get his presence approved—even arranging for a telegram to Kitchener from the Prime Minister the Marquess of Salisbury. In the end, Churchill was able to attend the war after obtaining a posting to the 21st Lancers—a force whose composition was chosen by the War Office, not Kitchener. He also served as a war correspondent for the Morning Post, at a rate of £15 per column. While in the Sudan, Churchill participated in what has been described as the last meaningful British cavalry charge in battle at the battle of Omdurman. By October 1898 he had returned to Britain and begun work on the two-volume The River War, published the following year.

In 1899 Churchill left the army and decided upon a parliamentary career. He stood as a Conservative candidate in Oldham constituency in a by-election of that year. He came third (Oldham was at that time a two-seat borough), failing to be elected.

On 12 October 1899 the second Anglo-Boer war between Britain and Afrikaners broke out in South Africa. Churchill set off as a war correspondent for the Morning Post, receiving £250 a month for four months. Once in South Africa he accepted a lift on a British Army Armoured Train under the command of Aylmer Haldane; this train was thrown off the tracks by a Boer ambush and explosion. Churchill, though not officially a combatant, took charge of operations to get the track cleared and managed to ensure that the engine and half the train, carrying the wounded, could escape. Churchill, however, was not so lucky and, together with other officers and soldiers was captured and held in a POW camp in Pretoria, despite doubt about his combatant status.

Churchill managed to escape from his prison camp, resulting in a long-running criticism and controversy as it was claimed that he did not wait for Haldane and another man who had planned the escape, but who were unable, or unwilling, to risk slipping over the fence when Churchill did. Once outside the Pretoria prison camp Churchill travelled almost 300 miles (480 km) to Portuguese Lourenço Marques in Delagoa Bay. He achieved this due to the assistance of an English mine manager who hid him down his mine and smuggled him onto a train headed out of Boer territory. His escape made him a minor national hero for a time in Britain, though instead of returning home he took ship to Durban and rejoined General Redvers Buller's army on its march to relieve Ladysmith and take Pretoria. This time, although continuing as a war correspondent, Churchill gained a commission in the South African Light Horse Regiment. He fought at Spion Kop and was one of the first British troops into Ladysmith and Pretoria; in fact, he and the Duke of Marlborough, his cousin, were able to get ahead of the rest of the troops in Pretoria, where they demanded and received the surrender of 52 Boer guards of the prison camp there.

Churchill's two books on the Boer war, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton's March, were published in May and October 1900 respectively.


After returning from South Africa Churchill again stood as a Conservative party candidate in Oldham, this time in the 1900 general election, or Khaki election.

He was duly elected but, rather than attending the opening of Parliament, he embarked on a speaking tour throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, by means of which he raised ten thousand pounds for himself. (Members of Parliament were unpaid in those days and Churchill was not rich by the standards of the time.) While in the United States, one of his speeches was introduced by Mark Twain, and he dined with the New York Governor and Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt.

In February 1901 Churchill arrived back in the United Kingdom to enter Parliament, and became associated with a group of Tory dissidents led by Lord Hugh Cecil and referred to as the Hughligans, a play on "Hooligans". During his first parliamentary session Churchill provoked controversy by opposing the government's army estimates, arguing against extravagant military expenditure. By 1903 he was drawing away from Lord Hugh's views. He also opposed the Liberal Unionist leader Joseph Chamberlain whose party was in coalition with the Conservatives. Chamberlain proposed extensive tariff reforms intended to protect the economic pre-eminence of Britain behind tariff barriers. This earned him the detestation of his own supporters — indeed, Conservative backbenchers staged a walkout once while he was speaking. His own constituency effectively deselected him, although he continued to sit for Oldham until the next general election.

In 1904 Churchill's dissatisfaction with the Conservatives and the appeal of the Liberals had grown so strong that on returning from the Whitsun recess he crossed the floor to sit as a member of the Liberal Party. As a Liberal he continued to campaign for free trade. The winnable seat of Manchester North West was found for him for the 1906 general election which he won.

Image:Winston Churchill as a young man.jpg

From 1903 until 1905 Churchill was also engaged in writing Lord Randolph Churchill, a two-volume biography of his father which came out in 1906 and was received as a masterpiece. However, filial devotion caused him to soften some of his father's less attractive aspects.Template:Fact

Ministerial office

When the Liberals took office, with Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister, in December 1905 Churchill became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. Serving under the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Victor Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin, Churchill dealt with the adoption of constitutions for the defeated Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and with the issue of 'Chinese slavery' in South African mines. He also became a prominent spokesman on free trade. Churchill soon became the most prominent member of the Government outside the Cabinet, and when Campbell-Bannerman was succeeded by Herbert Henry Asquith in 1908, it came as little surprise when Churchill was promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Under the law at the time, a newly appointed Cabinet Minister was obliged to seek re-election at a by-election. Churchill lost his Manchester seat to the Conservative William Joynson-Hicks but was soon elected in another by-election at Dundee constituency. As President of the Board of Trade he pursued radical social reforms in conjunction with David Lloyd George, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer.


1910 also saw Churchill preventing the army being used to deal with a dispute at the Cambrian Colliery mine in Tonypandy. Initially Churchill blocked the use of troops fearing a repeat of the 1887 'bloody sunday' in Trafalgar Square. Nevertheless troops were deployed to protect the mines and to avoid riots when thirteen strikers were tried for minor offences, an action that broke the tradition of not involving the military in civil affairs and led to lingering dislike for Churchill in Wales.


The development of the battle tank was financed from naval research funds via the Landships Committee, and, although a decade later development of the battle tank would be seen as a stroke of genius, at the time it was seen as misappropriation of funds. The battle tank was deployed ineptly in 1915, much to Churchill's annoyance. He wanted a fleet of tanks used to surprise the Germans under cover of smoke, and to open a large section of the trenches by crushing barbed wire and creating a breakthrough sector.

In 1915 Churchill was one of the political and military engineers of the disastrous Gallipoli landings on the Dardanelles during World War I, which led to his description as "the butcher of Gallipoli." This label was probably undeserved, as it has been suggested that the blame for the fiasco truly lies with the admiral of the Dardanelles fleet. When Asquith formed an all-party coalition government, the Conservatives demanded Churchill's demotion as the price for entry. For several months Churchill served in the non-portfolio job of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, before resigning from the government feeling his energies were not being used. He rejoined the army, though remaining an MP, and served for several months on the Western Front. During this period his second in command was a young Archibald Sinclair who would later lead the Liberal Party.

Return to power

In December 1916, Asquith resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by Lloyd George. However, the time was thought not yet right to risk the Conservatives' wrath by bringing Churchill back into government. However, in July 1917 Churchill was appointed Minister of Munitions. He was the main architect of the Ten Year Rule. However, the major preoccupation of his tenure in the War Office was the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Churchill was a staunch advocate of foreign intervention, declaring that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle". He secured from a divided and loosely organised Cabinet intensification and prolongation of the British involvement beyond the wishes of any major group in Parliament or the nation — and in the face of the bitter hostility of Labour. In 1920, after the last British forces had been withdrawn, Churchill was instrumental in having arms sent to the Poles when they invaded Ukraine. He became Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1921 and was a signatory of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State.

Career between the wars

In October 1922, Churchill underwent an operation to remove his appendix. Upon his return, he learned that the government had fallen and a General Election was looming. The Liberal Party was now beset by internal division and Churchill's campaign was weak. He lost his seat at Dundee to prohibitionist, Edwin Scrymgeour, quipping that he had lost his ministerial office, his seat and his appendix all at once. Churchill stood for the Liberals again in the 1923 general election, losing in Leicester, but over the next few months he moved towards the Conservative Party, though initially using the labels "Anti-Socialist" and "Constitutionalist". Less than one year later, in the General Election of 1924, he was elected to represent Epping as a "Constitutionalist" with Conservative backing (a statue in his honour in Woodford Green was erected when Woodford Green was part of the Epping constituency). The following year he formally rejoined the Conservative Party, commenting wryly that "Anyone can rat [change parties], but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat."

He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924 under Stanley Baldwin and oversaw the United Kingdom's disastrous return to the Gold Standard, which resulted in deflation, unemployment, and the miners' strike that led to the General Strike of 1926. This decision prompted the economist John Maynard Keynes to write The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, correctly arguing that the return to the gold standard would lead to a world depression. Churchill later regarded this as one of the worst decisions of his life. To be fair, it must be noted that he was not an economist and that he acted on the advice of the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman (of whom Keynes said, "Always so charming, always so wrong.")


The Conservative government was defeated in the 1929 General Election. In the next two years, Churchill became estranged from the Conservative leadership over the issues of protective tariffs and Indian Home Rule, which he bitterly opposed. He denigrated the father of the Indian independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi, as "a half-naked fakir" who "ought to be laid, bound hand and foot, at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated on its back". When Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government in 1931, Churchill was not invited to join the Cabinet. He was now at the lowest point in his career, in a period known as "the wilderness years". He spent much of the next few years concentrating on his writing, including Marlborough: His Life and Times — a biography of his ancestor John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough — and A History of the English Speaking Peoples (which was not published until well after WWII). He became most notable for his outspoken opposition towards the granting of independence to India (see Simon Commission and Government of India Act 1935).

Soon, though, his attention was drawn to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the dangers of Germany's rearmament. For a time he was a lone voice calling on Britain to strengthen itself to counter the belligerence of Germany. <ref>Picknett, et al., p. 75.</ref> Churchill was a fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, leading the wing of the Conservative Party that opposed the Munich Agreement which Chamberlain famously declared to mean "peace in our time". <ref>Picknett, et al., pp. 149–150.</ref> He was also an outspoken supporter of King Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis, leading to some speculation that he might be appointed Prime Minister if the King refused to take Baldwin's advice and consequently the government resigned. However, this did not happen, and Churchill found himself politically isolated and bruised for some time after this.

Role as wartime Prime Minister

At the outbreak of the Second World War Churchill's was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty as he was in the first part of the First World War, and the word went out to the Royal Navy's Home Fleet: "Winston's back!"



In May 1940, directly upon the German invasion of France by a surprising lightning advance through the Low Countries, it became clear that the country had no confidence in Chamberlain's prosecution of the war and so Chamberlain resigned. The commonly accepted version of events states that Lord Halifax turned down the post of Prime Minister because he believed he could not govern effectively as a member of the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons. Although traditionally the Prime Minister does not advise the King on the former's successor, Chamberlain wanted someone who would command the support of all three major parties in the House of Commons. A meeting with the other two party leaders led to the recommendation of Churchill, and as a constitutional monarch, George VI asked Churchill to be Prime Minister and to form an all-party government. Churchill, breaking with tradition, the former did not send Chamberlain a message expressing regret over his resignation. <ref>Picknett, et al., pp. 156–158.</ref>

One author has alleged that that the King favoured the appointment of Halifax, fearing that his own reign would not survive the war, and thought that Halifax would negotiate a settlement with Hitler to allow Britain to stay out of the war, so preserving the monarchy. <ref>Picknett, et al., p. 147.</ref>

Churchill's greatest achievement was that he then refused to capitulate when defeat by Germany was a strong possibility and he remained a strong opponent of any negotiations with Germany. Few others in the Cabinet had this degree of resolve. By adopting this policy Churchill maintained the United Kingdom as a base from which the Allies would eventually attack Germany, thereby ensuring that the Soviet sphere of influence did not also extend over Western Europe at the end of the war.



Image:Cairo conference.jpg His good relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt secured the United Kingdom vital supplies via the North Atlantic Ocean shipping routes. It was for this reason that Churchill was relieved when Roosevelt was re-elected. Upon re-election, Roosevelt immediately set about implementing a new method of not only providing military hardware to Britain without the need for monetary payment, but also of providing, free of fiscal charge, much of the shipping that transported the supplies. Put simply, Roosevelt persuaded Congress that repayment for this immensely costly service would take the form of defending the USA; and so Lend-lease was born. Churchill had 12 strategic conferences with Roosevelt which covered the Atlantic Charter, Europe first strategy, the Declaration by the United Nations and other war policies. Churchill initiated the Special Operations Executive (SOE) under Hugh Dalton's Ministry of Economic Warfare, which established, conducted and fostered covert, subversive and partisan operations in occupied territories with notable success; and also the Commandos which established the pattern for most of the world's current Special Forces. The Russians referred to him as the "British Bulldog". This could also be reflected by Churchill's willingness to face danger compared to his two allies, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin, who appeared reluctant in visiting enemy lines. This meant Churchill was very close to the Germans and ran the high risk of assassination. Indeed, Churchill was close to death, if not by his enemies, but his hard work ran the risk of health problems. This was shown by a mild heart attack he suffered in December 1941 at the White House and also in December 1943 due to pneumonia. There have been rumours that Churchill's heart actually stopped but his bodyguard administered the correct procedure and then it was covered up; however, this has never been confirmed.


Some of the military actions during the war remain controversial. Churchill was at best indifferent and perhaps complicit in the Great Bengal famine of 1943 which took the lives of at least 2.5 million Bengalis. Japanese troops were threatening British India after having successfully taken neighbouring British Burma. Some consider the British government's policy of denying effective famine relief a deliberate and callous scorched earth policy adopted in the event of a successful Japanese invasion. Churchill supported the bombing of Dresden shortly before the end of the war; many have since maintained that the city was primarily a civilian target with little military value. However, the bombing was seen at the time as being helpful to the Soviet allies.

Churchill was party to treaties that would redraw post-WWII European and Asian boundaries. These were discussed as early as 1943. Proposals for European boundaries and settlements were officially agreed to by Harry S. Truman, Churchill, and Stalin at Potsdam. At the second Quebec Conference in 1944 he drafted and together with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a toned down version of the original Morgenthau Plan, where they pledged to convert Germany after her unconditional surrender "into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character."<ref>Michael R. Beschloss, (2002) The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945 pg. 131. Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-7432-4454-0.</ref>


On October 9, 1944, he and Eden were in Moscow, and that night they met Stalin in the Kremlin, without the Americans. Bargaining went on throughout the night. Churchill wrote on a scrap of paper that the Stalin had a 90 percent "interest" in Romania, Britain a 90 percent "interest" in Greece, both Russia and Britain a 50 percent interest in Yugoslavia. When they got to Italy, Stalin ceded that country to Churchill. The crucial questions arose when the Ministers of Foreign Affairs discussed "percentages" in Eastern Europe. Molotov's proposals were that Russia should have a 75 percent interest in Hungary, 75 percent in Bulgaria, and 60 percent in Yugoslavia. This was Stalin's price for ceding Italy and Greece. Eden tried to haggle: Hungary 75/25, Bulgaria 80/20, but Yugoslavia 50/50. After lengthy bargaining they settled on an 80/20 division of interest between Russia and Britain in Bulgaria and Hungary, and a 50/50 division in Yugoslavia. U.S. Ambassador Harriman was informed only after the bargain was struck. This gentleman's agreement was sealed with a handshake.

After World War II

Although the importance of Churchill's role in World War II was undeniable, he had many enemies in his own country. His expressed contempt for a number of popular ideas, in particular public health care and better education for the majority of the population, produced much dissatisfaction amongst the population, particularly those who had fought in the war. Immediately following the close of the war in Europe, Churchill was heavily defeated in the 1945 election by Clement Attlee and the Labour Party. <ref>Picknett, et al., p. 190.</ref> Some historians think that many British voters believed that the man who had led the nation so well in war was not the best man to lead it in peace. Others see the election result as a reaction not against Churchill personally, but against the Conservative Party's record in the 1930s under Baldwin and Chamberlain.

Winston Churchill was an early supporter of the pan-Europeanism that eventually led to the formation of the European Common Market and later the European Union (for which one of the three main buildings of the European Parliament is named in his honour). Churchill was also instrumental in giving France a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (which provided another European power to counterbalance the Soviet Union's permanent seat). Churchill also occasionally made comments supportive of world government. For instance, he once said[2]:

Unless some effective world supergovernment for the purpose of preventing war can be set up… the prospects for peace and human progress are dark… If… it is found possible to build a world organization of irresistible force and inviolable authority for the purpose of securing peace, there are no limits to the blessings which all men enjoy and share.

At the beginning of the Cold War, he famously popularised the term: the "Iron Curtain", which had been used before by Nazi leaders Hitler and Goebells. The term entered the public consciousness after a 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, when Churchill, a guest of Harry S Truman, famously declared:


Second term

Churchill was restless and bored as leader of the Conservative opposition in the immediate post-war years. After Labour's defeat in the General Election of 1951, Churchill again became Prime Minister. His third government — after the wartime national government and the brief caretaker government of 1945 — would last until his resignation in 1955. During this period he renewed what he called the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States, and engaged himself in the formation of the post-war order.


One of the crises he inherited was the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iran. Churchill's government was supportive of the overthrow of the Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh by Fazlollah Zahedi in response to this threat.

The Mau Mau Rebellion


In 1953, the Lari massacre, perpetrated by Mau-Mau insurgents against Kikuyu loyal to the British, changed the political complexion of the rebellion and gave the public-relations advantage to the British. Churchill's strategy was to use a military stick combined with implementing many of the concessions that Attlee's government had blocked in 1951. He ordered an increased military presence and appointed General Sir George Erskine, who would implement Operation Anvil in 1954 that broke the back of the rebellion in the city of Nairobi. Operation Hammer, in turn, was designed to root out rebels in the countryside. Churchill ordered peace talks opened, but these collapsed shortly after his leaving office.

Malayan Emergency

Template:Main In Malaya, a rebellion against British rule had been in progress since 1948. Once again, Churchill's government inherited a crisis, and once again Churchill chose to use direct military action against those in rebellion while attempting to build an alliance with those who were not. He stepped up the implementation of a "hearts and minds" campaign and approved the creation of fortified villages, a tactic that would become a recurring part of Western military strategy in Southeast Asia. (See Vietnam War).

The Malayan Emergency was a more direct case of a guerrilla movement, centred in an ethnic group, but backed by the Soviet Union. As such, Britain's policy of direct confrontation and military victory had a great deal more support than in Iran or in Kenya. At the highpoint of the conflict, over 35,500 British troops were stationed in Malaya. As the rebellion lost ground, it began to lose favour with the local population.

While the rebellion was slowly being defeated, it was equally clear that colonial rule from Britain was no longer plausible. In 1953, plans were drawn up for independence for Singapore and the other crown colonies in the region. The first elections were held in 1955, just days before Churchill's own resignation, and in 1957, under Prime Minister Anthony Eden, Malaya became independent.


From 1941 to his death, he was the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a ceremonial office. In 1941 Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King swore him into the Queen's Privy Council for Canada. Although this allowed him to use the honorific title "The Honourable" and the post-nominal letters "P.C." both of these were trumped by his membership in the Imperial Privy Council which allowed him the use of The Right Honourable.


A stroke in June of that year led to him being paralysed down his left side. He retired as Prime Minister on 5 April, 1955 because of his health but retained his post as Chancellor of the University of Bristol, and remained a member of parliament until 1964. In 1959 he became Father of the House, the MP with the longest continuous service.

In 1955, after retiring as Prime Minister, Churchill was offered elevation to the peerage in the rank of duke. He considered the offer, and even chose the name "Duke of London". However, he then declined the title after being persuaded by his son Randolph not to accept it. Since then, only British royals have been made dukes.

In 1956 Churchill received the Karlspreis (known in English as the Charlemagne Award), an award by the German city of Aachen to those who most contribute to the European idea and European peace.

In 1960, Churchill College, Cambridge was established as the national and Commonwealth memorial to Churchill.

In 1963, he became the first person to become an Honorary Citizen of the United States.

Churchill is the tenth most admired person in the 20th century, according to Gallup.


On 12 September 1908 at the socially desirable St. Margaret's, Westminster, Churchill married Clementine Hozier, a dazzling but largely penniless beauty whom he met at a dinner party that March (he had proposed to actress Ethel Barrymore but was turned down). They had five children: Diana; Randolph; Sarah, who co-starred with Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding; Marigold, who died in early childhood; and Mary, who has written a book about her parents. Churchill's son Randolph and his grandsons Nicholas Soames and Winston all followed him into Parliament. The daughters tended to marry politicians and support their careers. Some of the siblings wrote serious books.


When not in London on government business, Churchill usually lived at his beloved Chartwell House in Kent, two miles south of Westerham. He and his wife bought the house in 1922 and lived there until his death in 1965. During his Chartwell stays, he enjoyed writing as well as painting, bricklaying, and admiring the estate's famous black swans.

For much of his life, Churchill battled with depression, which he called his black dog.

Last days


Aware that he was slowing down both physically and mentally, Churchill retired as Prime Minister in 1955 and was succeeded by Anthony Eden, who had long been his ambitious protégé. (Three years earlier, Eden had married Churchill's niece Anna Clarissa Churchill, his second marriage.) Churchill spent most of his retirement at Chartwell and in the south of France.


On 15 January, 1965, Churchill suffered another stroke — a severe cerebral thrombosis — that left him gravely ill. He died nine days later on 24 January 1965, 70 years to the day after his father's death. By decree of the Queen, his body lay in State in Westminster Hall for three days and a state funeral service was held at St Paul's Cathedral. <ref>Picknett, et al., p. 252.</ref> This was the first state funeral for a non-royal family member since that of Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar in 1914.

As his coffin passed down the Thames on the Havengore, the cranes of London's docklands bowed in salute. The Royal Artillery fired a 19-gun salute (as head of government), and the RAF staged a fly-by of sixteen English Electric Lightning fighters. The state funeral was the largest gathering of dignitaries in Britain as representatives from over 100 countries attended, including French President Charles de Gaulle, Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson, Prime Minister of Rhodesia Ian Smith, other heads of state and government, and members of royalty. It also saw the largest assemblage of statesmen in the world until the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005.

It has been suggested it was Churchill's wish that, were de Gaulle to outlive him, his (Churchill's) funeral procession should pass through Waterloo Station. This is complete myth. Though President de Gaulle did attend the service and the coffin departed for Bladon from Waterloo Station, there is absolutely no connection. In fact, Churchill did not plan his own funeral as commonly believed; he made a few suggestions, but there was a private committee which made the plans, and he was not on it.

At Churchill's request, he was buried in the family plot at St Martin Church, Bladon, near Woodstock, not far from his birthplace at Blenheim.

Because the funeral took place on 30 January, people in the United States marked it by paying tribute to his friendship with Roosevelt because it was the anniversary of FDR's birth. The tributes were led by Roosevelt's children.

On 9 February, 1965, Churchill's estate was probated at 304,044 pounds sterling (equivalent to about £3.8m in 2004).

Churchill as historian


Churchill was a prolific writer throughout his life and, during his periods out of office, attained recognition as a professional writer who was also a Member of Parliament. Despite his aristocratic birth, he inherited little money (his mother spent most of his inheritance) and always needed ready cash to maintain his lavish lifestyle and to compensate for a number of failed investments. Some of his historical works, such as A History of the English Speaking Peoples, were written primarily to raise money.

Although Churchill was an excellent writer, he was not trained as a historian. In his youth he was an avid reader of history but within a narrow range. The major influences on his historical thought, and his prose style, were Clarendon's history of the English Civil War, Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Macaulay's History of England. He had little interest in social or economic history; he saw history as essentially political and military, driven by great men rather than by economic forces or social change.

Churchill was one of the last (and most influential) exponents of "Whig history" — the belief of the 18th- and 19th-century Whigs that the British people had a unique greatness and an imperial destiny, and that all British history should be seen as progress towards fulfilling that destiny. This belief inspired his political career as well as his historical writing. It was criticized as an old-fashioned view of history even in Churchill's youth, but he never modified it or showed any interest in other schools of history. Although he employed professional historians as assistants, they had no influence over the content of his works.

Churchill's historical writings fall into three categories. The first is works of family history, the biographies of his father, Life of Lord Randolph Churchill (1906), and of his great ancestor, Marlborough: His Life and Times (four volumes, 1933–38). These are still regarded as fine biographies, but are marred by Churchill's desire to present his subjects in the best possible light. He made only limited use of the available source materials and, in the case of his father, suppressed some material from family archives that reflected badly on Lord Randolph. The Marlborough biography shows to the full Churchill's great talent for military history. Both books have been superseded by more scholarly works but are still highly readable.

The second category is Churchill's autobiographical works, including his early journalistic compilations The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), The River War (1899), London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900) and Ian Hamilton's March (1900). These latter two were issued in a re-edited form as My Early Life (1930). All these books are colourful and entertaining, and contain some valuable information about Britain's imperial wars in India, Sudan and South Africa, but they are essentially exercises in self-promotion, since Churchill was already a Parliamentary candidate in 1900.

Churchill's reputation as a writer, however, rests on the third category, his three massive multi-volume works of narrative history. These are his histories of the First World War — The World Crisis (six volumes, 1923–31) — and of The Second World War (six volumes, 1948–53), and his History of the English-Speaking Peoples (four volumes, 1956–58, much of which had been written in the 1930s). These are among the longest works of history ever published (The Second World War runs to more than two million words), and earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Churchill's histories of the two world wars are, of course, far from being conventional historical works, since the author was a central participant in both stories and took full advantage of that fact in writing his books. Both are in a sense, therefore, memoirs as well as histories, but Churchill was careful to broaden their scope to include events in which he played no part — the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, for example. Inevitably, however, Churchill placed Britain, and therefore himself, at the centre of his narrative. Arthur Balfour described The World Crisis as "Winston's brilliant autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe."

As a Cabinet minister for part of the First World War and as Prime Minister for nearly all of the Second, Churchill had unique access to official documents, military plans, official secrets and correspondence between world leaders. After the First War, when there were few rules governing these documents, Churchill simply took many of them with him when he left office and used them freely in his books — as did other wartime politicians such as David Lloyd George. As a result of this, strict rules were put in place preventing Cabinet ministers using official documents for writing history or memoirs once they left office.

The World Crisis was inspired by Lord Esher's attack on Churchill's reputation in his memoirs. It soon broadened out into a general multi-volume history. The volumes are a mix of military history, written with Churchill's usual narrative flair; diplomatic and political history, often written to justify Churchill's own actions and policies during the war; portraits of other political and military figures, sometimes written to further political vendettas or settle debts (most notably with Lloyd George); and personal memoir, written in a colourful but highly selective manner. Today these books are not in favour as historical references. As with all Churchill's works, they have little to say about economic or social history, and are coloured by his political views — particularly in regard to the Russian Revolution. But they remain highly readable for their narrative skill and vivid portrayals of people and events.

When he resumed office in 1939, Churchill fully intended writing a history of the war then beginning. He said several times: "I will leave judgements on this matter to history — but I will be one of the historians." To circumvent the rules against the use of official documents, he took the precaution throughout the war of having a weekly summary of correspondence, minutes, memoranda and other documents printed in galleys and headed "Prime Minister's personal minutes". These were then stored at his home for future use. As well, Churchill wrote or dictated a number of letters and memorandums with the specific intention of placing his views on the record for later use as a historian.

This all became a source of great controversy when The Second World War began appearing in 1948. Churchill was not an academic historian, he was a politician, and was in fact Leader of the Opposition, still intending to return to office. By what right, it was asked, did he have access to Cabinet, military and diplomatic records which were denied to other historians?

What was unknown at the time was the fact that Churchill had done a deal with the Attlee Labour government which came to office in 1945. Recognising Churchill's enormous prestige, Attlee agreed to allow him (or rather his research assistants) free access to most documents, provided that (a) no official secrets were revealed, (b) the documents were not used for party political purposes, and (c) the typescript was vetted by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook. Brook took a close interest in the books and rewrote some sections himself to ensure that nothing was said which might harm British interests or embarrass the government. Churchill's history thus became a semi-official one.

Churchill's privileged access to documents and his unrivalled personal knowledge gave him an advantage over all other historians of the Second World War for many years. The books had enormous sales in both Britain and the United States and made Churchill a rich man for the first time. It was not until after his death and the opening of the archives that some of the deficiencies of his work became apparent.

Some of these were inherent in the unique position Churchill occupied as a historian, being both a former Prime Minister and a serving politician. He could not reveal military secrets, such as the work of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park (see Ultra) or the planning of the atomic bomb. He could not discuss wartime disputes with figures such as Dwight Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle or Tito, since they were still world leaders at the time he was writing. He could not discuss Cabinet disputes with Labour leaders such as Attlee, whose goodwill the project depended on. He could not reflect on the deficiencies of generals such as Archibald Wavell or Claude Auchinleck for fear they might sue him (some, indeed, threatened to do so).



The Second World War can still be read with great profit by students of the period, provided it is seen mainly as a memoir by a leading participant rather than as an authoritative history by a detached historian. The war, and particularly the period between 1940 and 1942 when Britain was fighting alone, was the climax of Churchill's career, and his personal account of the inside story of those days is unique and invaluable. But, since the archives have been opened, far more accurate and reliable histories have emerged.

Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples was commissioned and largely written in the 1930s when Churchill badly needed money, but it was put aside when war broke out in 1939, being finally issued after he left office for the last time in 1955. Although it contains much fine writing, it shows Churchill's deficiencies as a historian at their most glaring. It is generally regarded as tendentious and very old-fashioned, seeing world history as a one-dimensional pageant of battles and speeches, kings and statesmen, in which the English occupy central stage. Events viewed by today's historians as being of central importance, such as the industrial revolution, are scarcely mentioned. Although Churchill's enormous prestige ensured that the books were respectfully received and sold well, they are little read today.

Churchill's war cabinet, May 1940–May 1945


Winston Churchill's caretaker cabinet, May–July 1945

Winston Churchill's third cabinet, October 1951–April 1955


  • March 1952: Lord Salisbury succeeds Lord Ismay as Commonwealth Relations Secretary. Salisbury remains also Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords. Lord Alexander of Tunis succeeds Churchill as Minister of Defence.
  • May 1952: Harry Crookshank succeeds Lord Salisbury as Lord Privy Seal, remaining Leader of the House of Commons. Salisbury remains Commonwealth Relations Secretary and Leader of the House of Lords. Crookshank's successor as Minister of Health is not in the Cabinet.
  • November 1952: Lord Woolton becomes Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Lord Salisbury succeeds Lord Woolton as Lord President. Lord Swinton succeeds Lord Salisbury as Commonwealth Relations Secretary.
  • September 1953: Florence Horsbrugh, the Minister of Education, Sir Thomas Dugdale, the Minister of Agriculture, and Gwilym Lloyd George, the Minister of Food, enter the cabinet. The Ministry for the Co-ordination of Transport, Fuel, and Power, is abolished, and Lord Leathers leaves the Cabinet.
  • October 1953: Lord Cherwell resigns as Paymaster General. His successor is not in the Cabinet.
  • July 1954: Alan Lennox-Boyd succeeds Oliver Lyttelton as Colonial Secretary. Derick Heathcoat Amory succeeds Sir Thomas Dugdale as Minister of Agriculture.
  • October 1954: Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, now Lord Kilmuir, succeeds Lord Simonds as Lord Chancellor. Gwilym Lloyd George succeeds him as Home Secretary. The Food Ministry is merged into the Ministry of Agriculture. Sir David Eccles succeeds Florence Horsbrugh as Minister of Education. Harold Macmillan succeeds Lord Alexander of Tunis as Minister of Defence. Duncan Sandys succeeds Macmillan as Minister of Housing and Local Government. Osbert Peake, the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance, enters the Cabinet.

Notes and references


Other references

External links

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