Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (November 30, 1874 - January 24, 1965)
was one of the most prominent leaders of the 20th century, best known as
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War II.
Terms of Office: 10 May 1940 - 27 July 1945
26 October 1951 - 7 April 1955
PM Predecessor: Neville Chamberlain
Clement Attlee
PM Successor: Clement Attlee
Anthony Eden
Early career Date of Birth: 30 November 1874
Born at Blenheim Palace, Place of Birth: Oxfordshire, England
Winston Churchill was a Political Party: Conservative Party, Liberals
descendant of the first
famous member of the Churchill family: John Churchill, 1st Duke of
Marlborough (whose father was also a "Sir Winston Churchill"). Winston's
politician father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was the third son of the 7th
Duke of Marlborough: Winston's mother was Jennie Jerome (nŽe Jeanette
Jerome) of Brooklyn, New York, a daughter of American millionaire Leonard Jerome.
In 1895, he went to Cuba as a military observer with the Spanish army in its
fight against the independentists. He also reported for the Saturday Review.
The first notable appearance of Winston Churchill was as a war-correspondent
in the second Anglo-Boer war between Britain and self-proclaimed Afrikaaners
in South Africa. He was captured in a Boer ambush of a British Army train
convoy, but managed a high profile escape and eventually crossed the South
African border to Lorenzo Marques (now Maputo in Mozambique).
Churchill used the status achieved to begin a political career which would
last a total of sixty-one years, serving as an MP in the House of Commons
from 1901 to 1922 and from 1924 to 1964. At first a member of the
Conservative Party, he soon 'crossed the floor' to the Liberals and entered
the Cabinet in his early thirties. He 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". He
was a signatory of the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 which established the
Irish Free State. The Liberal Party was now beset by internal division.
After losing his seat in the 1922 General Election to Edwin Scrymgeour he
rejoined the Conservative Party. Two years later in the General Election of
1924 he was elected to represent Epping (where there is now a statue of him)
as a Conservative. He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1926
under Stanley Baldwin and was responsible for returning Britain to the Gold
Standard. During the General Strike of 1926, Churchill was reported to have
suggested that machine guns should be used on the striking miners. Churchill
edited the Government's newspaper, the British Gazette, during the dispute
he argued that "either the country will break the General Strike, or the
General Strike will break the country.".
The Conservative government was defeated in the 1929 General Election. 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 next few years
concentrating on his writing, including the 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. Soon though, his attention was drawn to the rise of Adolf Hitler and
Germany's rearmament. For a time he was a lone voice calling on Britain to
re-arm itself and counter the belligerence of Germany. Churchill was a
fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler.
Role as Wartime Prime Minister
At the outbreak of the Second World War Churchill was appointed First Lord
of the Admiralty On Chamberlain's resignation in May, 1940, Churchill was
appointed Prime Minister and formed an all-party government. He immediately
made his friend and confidant, industrialist and newspaper baron, Max
Aitken, (Lord Beaverbrook) in charge of aircraft production. It was Aitken's
astounding business acumen that allowed Britain to quickly gear up aircraft
production and engineering that eventually made the difference in the war.
His speeches at that time were a great inspiration to the embattled United
Kingdom. His famous "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and
sweat" speech was his first as Prime Minister. He followed that closely,
before the Battle of Britain, with "We shall defend our island, whatever the
cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing
grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in
the hills; we shall never surrender."
(It has been suggested that some of Churchill's radio speeches, including
"We shall fight on the beaches", were actually spoken by soundalike actors
because Churchill was too busy to make them himself, but this has not been
conclusively proven.)
His good relationship with U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt secured the
United Kingdom vital supplies via the North Atlantic Ocean shipping routes.
Churchill initiated the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a branch of MI6,
which established, conducted and fostered covert, subversive and partisan
operations in occupied territories with notable success; and also the
Commandos which establish the pattern for most of the world's current
Special Forces.
Churchill was one of the driving forces behind the treaties that would re-draw
post-WWII European and Asian boundaries. The boundary between North Korea
and South Korea were proposed at the Yalta Conference, as well as the
expulsion of Japanese from those countries. Proposals for European
boundaries and settlements were discussed as early as 1943 by Roosevelt and
Churchill; the settlement was officially agreed to by Truman, Churchill, and
Stalin at Potsdam (Article XIII of the Potsdam protocol).
One of these settlements was the boundary between the future East Germany
and Poland at the Oder-Neisse line, which was rationalized as compensation
for Soviet gains in Ukraine. As part of the settlement was an agreement to
continue the expulsion of ethnic Germans from the area, which arguably had
begun as a program after 1920 when Poland had been given the Polish Corridor
by Britain and France. The exact numbers and movement of ethnic populations
over the Polish-German and Polish-USSR borders in the period between the end
of World War I and the end of World War II is vastly difficult to determine.
This is not least because, under the Nazi regime, many Poles were replaced
in their homes by the conquering Germans in an attempt to consolidate Nazi
power. In the case of the post-WWII settlement, Churchill was convinced that
the only way to alleviate tensions between the two populations was the
expulsion of the Germans, despite the fact that many of the ethnic Germans
had lived in Poland for generations. As Churchill expounded in the House of
Commons in 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, in so far as we have been
able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no
mixture of populations to cause endless trouble...A clean sweep will be
made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in
modern conditions..."
Although the importance of Churchill's role in World War II was undeniable,
he produced many enemies in his own country. His expressed contempt for
ideas such as public health care and for better education for the majority
of the population in particular 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 at
election by Clement Attlee and the Labour Party.
Winston Churchill was an early supporter of the pan-Europism that eventually
lead 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 honor). Churchill was also instrumental in giving France a
permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (which he supported in
order to have another European power to counter-balance the Soviet Union's
permanent seat).
At the beginning of the Cold War he coined the term the "Iron Curtain," a
phrase that entered the public consciousness after a 1946 speech at
Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri when he famously declared "From
Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has
descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the
ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague,
Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and
the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere."
Second Term
Following Labour's defeat in the General Election of 1951, Churchill again
became Prime Minister. In 1953 he was awarded two major honours. He was
knighted and became Sir Winston Churchill and he was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature "for his mastery of historical and biographical description
as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values". A
stroke in June of that year led to him being paralysed down his left side.
He retired because of his health on April 5, 1955 but retained his post as
Chancellor of the University of Bristol.
Family
On September 2, 1908, at the socially desirable church of St. Margaret's,
Westminster, Churchill married Clementine Ogilvy Hozier (1885-1977), a
dazzling but largely penniless beauty. They had five children: Sarah
Millicent Hermione Churchill (who became a movie actress of some renown,
costarring with Fred Astaire in the film "Royal Wedding"), Randolph
Frederick Edward Churchill, Marigold Frances Churchill (who died as a
child), Diana Churchill, and Mary Churchill.
Clementine Churchill's mother was Lady (Henrietta) Blanche Ogilvy
(1852-1925), the second wife of Sir Henry Montague Hozier and a daughter of
the 7th Earl of Airlie. The identity of her father, however, is open to
healthy debate. Lady Blanche was well known for sharing her sexual favors
and was eventually divorced as a result. She maintained that Clementine's
father was Capt. William George "Bay" Middleton, a noted horseman. But
Clementine Churchill's biographer Joan Hardwick has surmised that all Lady
Blanche's "Hozier" children were actually fathered by her sister
Clementine's husband, Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford (1837-1916, better
known as a grandfather of the infamous Mitford girls of the 1920s).
Last Days
On January 15, 1965 Churchill suffered another stroke - a severe cerebral
thrombosis - that left him gravely ill. He died nine days later on January
24, 1965. His body lay in State in Westminster Hall for three days and a
state funeral service was held at St Paul's Cathedral. This was the first
state funeral for a commoner since that of the Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of
Wellington over 100 years earlier. It was Churchill's wish that, if de
Gaulle survived him, that his (Churchill's) funeral procession should pass
through Waterloo Station. As his coffin passed down the Thames on a boat,
the cranes of London's docklands bowed in salute.
At Churchill's request, he was buried in the family plot at Saint Martin's
Churchyard, Bladon, Woodstock, England.
Notable Quotes
* "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight
in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight
with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall
defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the
beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the
fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never
surrender." (radio broadcast on June 4, 1940).
* "I have nothing to offer but blood, tears, toil and sweat." (speech to
the House of Commons on May 13, 1940).
* "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves
that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand
years men will still say 'This was their finest hour'"
* On the RAF following victory in the Battle of Britain: "Never in the
field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few"
* "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain
has descended across the Continent." (March 5, 1946 - speech given at
Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri)
* Written in the margin of a memo objecting to a preposition at the end
of a sentence, "This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not
put." [1]
Less Notable Quotes
Churchill is known as a great wit as well as a politician.
* Nancy Astor once told him "If I were your wife I'd poison your coffee,"
to which Churchill replied: "If I were your husband, madam, I would
drink it."
* He received a report from Admiral Pound, whom Churchill did not rate.
On the report he wrote "Pennywise" - a reference to the old adage,
"Penny wise and pound foolish".
* On Stanley Baldwin: "He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but
hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened."
* On Clement Attlee:
o "A sheep in sheeps' clothing."
o "A modest man, who has much to be modest about."
o "An empty taxi arrived at 10 Downing Street, and when the door
opened, Attlee got out."
* On being told by Bessie Braddock MP: "Winston, You're drunk!" he
replied "Bessie, You're ugly. But in the morning I shall be sober."
* On being told by an MP that his fly was open: "It is of no account,
after all, the old bird does not fly far from his nest."
* "I am prepared to meet my maker. Whether my maker is prepared for the
great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
Miscellany
Churchill is believed by several writers to have suffered from bipolar
disorder and in his last years, Alzheimers Disease; certainly he suffered
from fits of depression that he called his "black dogs".
The United States Navy destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill (DD-81) is named
in his honour. Churchill was the first person to be made an Honorary Citizen
of the United States.
Churchill was voted as "The Greatest Briton" in 2002 "100 Greatest Britons"
poll sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the public. He was also named
Time Magazine "Man of the Half-Century" in the early 1950s.
