Winston Churchill

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born on November 30, 1874, at Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England. His father, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill, was a Conservative politician, and his mother, Jennie Jerome, was American-born; they had married on April 15, 1874.⁠[1][2][3][4]

His brother Jack was born on February 4, 1880. The two brothers were brought up by their nanny, Mrs Everest.⁠[3]

On November 3, 1882, Churchill entered St George’s School near Ascot; he was later sent to a boarding school in Brighton and then went on to Harrow School.⁠[3][4]

Churchill passed the entrance examination for the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, only at his third attempt. He entered on June 28, 1893, and graduated in December 1894, twentieth in a class of 130.⁠[3][5]

On January 24, 1895, his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, died at the age of 45. On February 20 that year Churchill was commissioned into the Queen’s Own 4th Hussars, and on November 30 he observed the fighting in Cuba.⁠[5][1]

On October 3, 1896, Churchill arrived with his regiment at Bangalore, India; on September 4, 1897, he joined the Malakand Field Force under Sir Bindon Blood. On September 2, 1898, he took part in a cavalry charge with the 21st Lancers at Omdurman.⁠[5]

He drew on these experiences in The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) and The River War (1899), and in 1900 published his only novel, Savrola.⁠[4]

In April 1899 Churchill resigned from the army to pursue a political career. On July 6 that year he was defeated in his first attempt to enter Parliament. On November 15, 1899, he was captured by the Boers in South Africa, and on December 12 he escaped from prison in Pretoria.⁠[5]

In October 1900 Churchill was elected Conservative Member of Parliament for Oldham. In December that year he began a lecture tour of North America, meeting Governor Theodore Roosevelt on December 10.⁠[6][1][5]

On May 31, 1904, Churchill broke with the Conservative Party and joined the Liberals.⁠[7][1]

On December 13, 1905, Churchill became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. In January 1906 he was elected Member for Manchester North West. On April 12, 1908, he entered the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, and from May that year he sat for Dundee.⁠[7][6]

On September 12, 1908, Churchill married Clementine Hozier in London. They had five children: Diana (born July 11, 1909), Randolph (born May 29, 1911), Sarah (born October 7, 1914), Marigold (born November 15, 1918, who died of septicaemia on August 23, 1921) and Mary (born September 15, 1922).⁠[7][8]

On February 14, 1910, Churchill became Home Secretary. The Battle of Sidney Street took place on January 3, 1911.⁠[7][6]

On October 25, 1911, Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, a post he held until 1915.⁠[7][4]

On January 3, 1915, Churchill proposed a naval and military attack on the Dardanelles; the naval attack failed on March 18. On May 15 the First Sea Lord, Lord Fisher, abruptly resigned. The Gallipoli campaign that he had created ended in disaster.⁠[7][1]

On November 19, 1915, Churchill went to fight on the Western Front in France, attached to the 2nd Battalion, Grenadier Guards; on May 7, 1916, he returned to London and Parliament.⁠[7][1]

On July 18, 1917, Churchill became Minister of Munitions; on January 9, 1919, Secretary of State for War and Air; and on February 14, 1921, Colonial Secretary.⁠[7]

On September 14, 1922, his offer to buy Chartwell was accepted. On November 15 that year, laid low by appendicitis, he was defeated at Dundee.⁠[7][6]

On October 29, 1924, Churchill was elected Member for Epping as a Constitutionalist, and on November 7 he became Chancellor of the Exchequer. In his first budget, on April 29, 1925, he returned Britain to the Gold Standard, a controversial decision. In October 1925 he officially rejoined the Conservative Party.⁠[7][1][6]

The General Strike lasted from May 2 to May 13, 1926. On May 30, 1929, the Baldwin government was defeated at the general election, and Churchill resigned as Chancellor on June 4.⁠[7]

After the Conservatives’ defeat in 1929, Churchill spent about eleven years out of office. In this period he was almost alone in his firm opposition to Indian independence and to plans to give India greater self-government.⁠[1][9]

He wrote prolifically in these years, publishing the memoir My Early Life (1930), the four-volume The World Crisis (1923–1929) and Marlborough (1933–1938), a four-volume biography of his ancestor.⁠[4]

On March 14, 1933, he made his first speech on the need to rebuild Britain’s air defences; on December 7, 1936, he was shouted down in the House of Commons for supporting King Edward VIII; and on May 29, 1937, he warned the German ambassador, “Do not underestimate England.”⁠[9]

On August 27, 1939, the Cabinet War Rooms beneath Whitehall became fully operational, a week before Britain declared war on Germany. When the Second World War broke out on September 3, Churchill was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty.⁠[10][9][4]

After Germany invaded Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940, Churchill succeeded Neville Chamberlain on May 10 as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, at the head of an all-party coalition.⁠[11][6][1]

On May 13 he moved a motion in the House of Commons welcoming the formation of the new Government, declaring: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” The motion was agreed without a division.⁠[12]

On June 4 he informed the House that the Navy had “carried over 335,000 men, French and British” from Dunkirk, and declared, “We shall fight on the beaches.” On June 18 he gave his “Finest Hour” speech.⁠[13][11]

On August 12, 1941, Churchill drafted the Atlantic Charter communiqué. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he attended the Washington conference from December 22, 1941, to January 14, 1942. From November 28 to December 1, 1943, he met Roosevelt and Stalin at the Teheran Conference, and the three met at Yalta on February 4–12, 1945.⁠[11]

During the war Churchill’s War Cabinet met 115 times in the Cabinet War Rooms, most often during the Blitz and the later V-weapon offensive.⁠[10]

On May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered and Victory in Europe Day was celebrated. Britain went to the polls on July 5, when Churchill was elected for the Woodford constituency; from July 17 to 25 he met President Truman and Stalin at Potsdam. Labour’s Clement Attlee won the general election, and Churchill resigned as Prime Minister on July 26.⁠[11][6][1]

On August 16, 1945, the lights in the Map Room of the Cabinet War Rooms were turned off for the first time in six years; in 1984 Imperial War Museums opened the rooms to the public for the first time.⁠[10]

On March 5, 1946, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, Churchill said that “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”⁠[14][1]

That year he created the Chartwell Literary Trust, into which his papers up to July 27, 1945, were vested.⁠[15]

On June 21, 1948, Churchill published The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his Second World War memoirs, which appeared in six volumes between 1948 and 1953–1954. He also published Painting as a Pastime in 1948 and the four-volume A History of the English-speaking Peoples in 1956–1958.⁠[14][4]

In August 1949 Churchill suffered his first stroke. After the Conservative victory of 1951 he became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence for the second time on October 26; Roy Jenkins described him at this time as “gloriously unfit for office.” On June 23, 1953, he suffered a second stroke, which was kept secret.⁠[14][6][1]

In 1953 the Queen invested Churchill with the insignia of the Order of the Garter. That year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”⁠[4][2][1]

On April 5, 1955, Churchill resigned as Prime Minister for the final time, owing to poor health.⁠[14][6][1]

From 1959 to 1964 Churchill was Father of the House of Commons. In 1960 Churchill College, Cambridge, was founded by Royal Charter to embody his vision of how higher education could benefit modern society, set up as the UK’s equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.⁠[6][16]

On April 9, 1963, President John F. Kennedy proclaimed him an honorary citizen of the United States. He did not stand at the general election of 1964, ending a parliamentary career that had begun in 1900.⁠[14][4][6]

Churchill died in London on January 24, 1965, aged 90. He was given a state funeral on January 30, with the cortege passing down Whitehall; after the public ceremony he was laid to rest in a private family interment at St Martin’s Church, Bladon, Oxfordshire.⁠[1][8][17]

While writing the official biography, Churchill’s son Randolph kept his father’s papers at his home, Stour, in East Bergholt, Suffolk; after Randolph’s death in 1968 they went to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. In 1969 Clementine Churchill gave 80 boxes of the post-1945 papers to the archives centre at Churchill College, Cambridge.⁠[18][19][15]

In April 1995 Churchill’s papers were bought for the nation from the Chartwell Trust for £12.5 million, funded by the newly established Heritage Lottery Fund and by a Getty grant. J. Paul Getty Jr.John Paul Getty Jr.John Paul Getty Jr. (1932–2003), known as Sir Paul Getty, was a son of oil businessman J. Paul Getty and a Britain-based philanthropist and book collector who made large gifts to the National Gallery, the British Film Institute and cricket, and received an honorary KBE in 1986.Open the full entry put up £1 million and the Heritage Lottery Fund £11.5 million towards the purchase price; including cataloguing, conservation and an endowment, the Fund provided £13.25 million in all.⁠[18][15][20]

The purchase vested ownership of all the papers in an independent charity, the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust, and they are held in perpetuity at the Churchill Archives Centre, about one million items in some 2,500 archival boxes.⁠[18][15]

The deal was controversial at the time, partly because the beneficiaries included Churchill’s grandson and namesake Winston Churchill, then a Conservative MP; Boris Johnson, then a Daily Telegraph columnist, criticised the use of lottery money as “taking from the poor to give to the rich.” Files released by the National Archives show that the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, warned Prime Minister John Major that without the deal the archive could be broken up.⁠[21]

In 2015 Winston Churchill’s archive was added to UNESCO’s International Memory of the World Register.⁠[22]