Winston Churchill

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Winston Churchill was born on the 30th of November 1874 inside Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home his family had held for generations in Oxfordshire. The building itself said something about who he was: a man descended from John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, raised amid the grandeur of the English aristocracy, yet shaped by a childhood that was lonelier than the surroundings suggested. His parents were largely absent. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, and his mother, Jennie, were effectively estranged for much of the 1880s, leaving Winston and his younger brother Jack in the care of their nanny, Elizabeth Everest. When Everest died in 1895, Churchill wrote that she had been his "dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived".

  The story that follows spans more than six decades of public life. Churchill sat in Parliament for some 62 of the years between 1900 and 1964. He represented five different constituencies. He served as a military officer, a war correspondent, a painter, and a prolific writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953. And in May 1940, as German forces swept through Western Europe, he became prime minister at the moment Britain most needed someone who would refuse to stop fighting.

  What drove a man of aristocratic privilege toward social reform? How did he survive the political wilderness of the 1930s while almost everyone else was looking away from Hitler? And what does it mean that the same leader who rallied a nation against fascism oversaw policies connected to one of the worst famines of the 20th century? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. Soldier, Writer, Escapee

  ›

  In February 1895, Churchill was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 4th Queen's Own Hussars, based at Aldershot. He was restless almost immediately. Using his mother's influence, he arranged to observe the Cuban War of Independence that same autumn, sending reports back to the Daily Graphic in London. It was the beginning of a habit: wherever there was a conflict, Churchill found a way to be both participant and narrator.

  With the Hussars he went to Bombay in October 1896, spending 19 months in India, based in Bangalore. The posting gave him something unexpected: time to read. He worked through Plato, Edward Gibbon, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, the books shipped to him by his mother. He also asked her for copies of The Annual Register, a political almanack, because he wanted to understand how Parliament worked. An 1898 letter revealed another dimension of his inner life: he told a correspondent that he did not accept the Christian or any other form of religious belief, and in another letter described religion as "a delicious narcotic".

  In the Swat Valley of north-west India, Churchill volunteered to join Bindon Blood's Malakand Field Force against Mohmand rebels, on condition that he be assigned as a journalist. He returned to Bangalore in October 1897 and wrote his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which received positive reviews. The biographer Roy Jenkins described writing as Churchill's "whole habit", particularly when he was out of office. Churchill himself acknowledged the function it served, calling writing his safeguard against recurring depression, which he referred to as his "black dog".

  The Sudan in 1898 produced one of his most vivid wartime moments. Churchill participated in one of the British Army's last cavalry charges, at the Battle of Omdurman in September of that year, while working as a journalist for The Morning Post. He later left the army partly because he was appalled by General Herbert Kitchener's treatment of enemy wounded and by his desecration of Muhammad Ahmad's tomb.

  The South Africa episode in 1899 made Churchill famous. Covering the Second Boer War for the Morning Post, he was captured at the Battle of Chieveley when his train was derailed by artillery fire. He was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria. In December, he escaped by hiding on freight trains and eventually reached Portuguese East Africa. The escape attracted wide attention. He briefly rejoined the army, fought at the Siege of Ladysmith, and, with his cousin Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough, accepted the surrender of 52 Boer prison camp guards. He returned to Britain in July 1900. His dispatches, published as London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, sold well.

• 3. The Reforming Minister

  ›

  Churchill took his seat in the House of Commons in February 1901 as a Conservative MP, having won the Oldham seat aged 25. Within three years he had crossed the floor to join the Liberals. The switch was driven partly by his opposition to protectionism and partly by political calculation, but also by genuine conviction. In May 1904, speaking against the government's proposed Aliens Bill, he argued that it would appeal to prejudice against foreigners, against Jews, and against labour competition, and he declared himself in favour of "the old tolerant and generous practice of free entry and asylum".

  By 1908, Asquith had appointed him President of the Board of Trade. Aged 33, he was the youngest Cabinet member since 1866. He married Clementine Hozier on the 12th of September 1908 at St Margaret's, Westminster. The success of their marriage, he later wrote, provided him with a secure and happy background that was important to his career.

  As a minister, Churchill pushed labour reform with unusual energy. He introduced the Mines Eight Hours Bill, which prohibited miners from working more than eight hours a day. He introduced the Trade Boards Bill in 1909, establishing boards that could prosecute exploitative employers; passing with a large majority, it set the principle of a minimum wage and the right to meal breaks. He also proposed the Labour Exchanges Bill to establish over 200 labour exchanges to help the unemployed find work. The unemployment insurance scheme he championed was part-funded by the state.

  Promoted to Home Secretary in February 1910, he implemented a prison reform programme that included a distinction between criminal and political prisoners, the establishment of prison libraries, requirements for entertainments four times a year, and relaxed rules on solitary confinement. He reduced 21 of the 43 death sentences passed during his tenure. He proposed abolishing automatic imprisonment for those who failed to pay fines and ended imprisonment for people aged 16 to 21 except for the most serious offences.

  In November 1910, Churchill handled the Tonypandy riots in the Rhondda Valley, where coal miners violently protested against working conditions. When the Chief Constable of Glamorgan requested troops, Churchill let them travel only as far as Swindon and Cardiff and blocked their deployment, sending instead 270 unarmed London police officers. He offered the protesters an interview with the government's chief industrial arbitrator. The Times accused him of being soft on the rioters; the Labour Party considered him too heavy-handed. Both judgements followed him for years.

• 4. War, Demotion, and the Western Front

  ›

  Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911, and immediately set about transforming British naval readiness. He created a naval war staff, pushed for greater pay and recreational facilities for sailors, championed the Royal Naval Air Service, and even coined the term "seaplane", ordering a hundred to be built. After Germany passed its 1912 Naval Law to increase warship production, he vowed Britain would build two battleships for every one Germany laid down. In June 1914, he persuaded the House of Commons to authorise the government purchase of a 51% share in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company to secure oil access for the navy.

  When the First World War began in August 1914, the navy transported 120,000 troops to France. Churchill sent submarines to the Baltic Sea to support the Russian Navy, sent the Marine Brigade to Ostend, and in September assumed full responsibility for Britain's aerial defence. He also financed and set in motion the development of the tank using Admiralty funds.

  The Dardanelles campaign was his undoing, for a time. In March 1915, an Anglo-French task force attempted a naval bombardment of Turkish defences. In April, the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, including the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, assaulted at Gallipoli. Both operations failed. Conservative MPs blamed Churchill. When Asquith formed an all-party coalition in May, the Conservatives made Churchill's removal from the Admiralty their condition of entry. He was demoted to the lesser post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

  On the 25th of November 1915, Churchill resigned from the government. He joined the 2nd Grenadier Guards on the Western Front. In January 1916, he was temporarily promoted to lieutenant-colonel and given command of the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers, deployed near Ploegsteert on the Belgian Front. For three months they faced continual shelling. Churchill narrowly escaped death when a large piece of shrapnel fell between him and his cousin the Duke of Marlborough during a visit. In May, the battalion merged into the 15th Division and Churchill returned to the House of Commons. His temporary promotion ended on the 16th of May 1916, when he reverted to the rank of major.

• 5. The Wilderness Years

  ›

  Churchill's time as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Stanley Baldwin, from 1924 to 1929, ended in a significant policy failure. In April 1925, he restored sterling to the gold standard at its 1914 parity, against the advice of leading economists including John Maynard Keynes. The return to gold is held to have caused deflation and substantial unemployment, with a devastating impact on the coal industry. During the General Strike of 1926, Churchill edited the British Gazette, the government's anti-strike propaganda newspaper.

  After the Conservatives lost the 1929 general election, Churchill entered a long period out of power. He was prone to his "black dog" depression and addressed it through work, embarking on Marlborough: His Life and Times, a four-volume biography of his ancestor John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, which was published between October 1933 and September 1938. His autobiography, My Early Life, appeared in October 1930 and was translated into multiple languages. He came off worst financially in the Wall Street crash. On the 13th of December 1931, while crossing Fifth Avenue in New York, he was knocked down by a car, suffering a head wound from which he developed neuritis.

  What distinguished the 1930s wilderness years was what Churchill saw and others refused to. After Hitler came to power in January 1933, Churchill publicly warned about the menace of the Nazi regime and expressed alarm that British air force spending had been cut. Armed with data provided clandestinely by senior civil servants Desmond Morton and Ralph Wigram, he was able to speak with authority about Germany's military build-up, especially the development of the Luftwaffe. He broadcast his concerns on the radio in November 1934.

  In 1938, Churchill urged the government against appeasement and called for collective European action to deter German aggression. When Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement on the 30th of September, agreeing to Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland, Churchill told the House of Commons on the 5th of October that it represented "a total and unmitigated defeat". His popularity grew as events proved him right.

• 6. The Words That Held a Nation

  ›

  Churchill's first speech as prime minister, delivered to the Commons on the 13th of May 1940, was the "blood, toil, tears and sweat" address. He told the House he had nothing to offer but those four things, and that the aim was "victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival".

  What is less well known is that Churchill had a lateral lisp from childhood and was unable to pronounce the letter s, verbalising it with a slur. He worked on his pronunciation by repeating phrases designed to cure the problem with the sibilant "s". He eventually turned the impediment into an asset, most strikingly when he referred to Hitler as a "Nar-zee", rhyming with "khazi", with deliberate emphasis on the "z". The biographer Roy Jenkins wrote that Churchill's speeches were "an inspiration for the nation, and a catharsis for Churchill himself".

  The evacuation of Dunkirk ended on the 4th of June 1940, with 338,226 Allied servicemen rescued, far exceeding expectations. Churchill called it "a miracle of deliverance" in the "we shall fight on the beaches" speech that afternoon. The speech closed with a direct appeal to the United States, a reminder that Churchill already understood that Britain could not win alone. He was, he wrote privately, confident Great Britain could hold its own given the increase in output, but realistic that it could not defeat Germany without American intervention.

  On the 20th of August 1940, during the Battle of Britain, Churchill described the RAF fighter pilots in the Commons with the phrase that became their defining epitaph: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." He had told his private secretary John Colville by November that he believed the threat of invasion was past. The Lend-Lease agreement, formally enacted on the 11th of March 1941, helped secure the food, oil, and munitions flowing via the North Atlantic.

• 7. Alliances, Disasters, and Famine

  ›

  Churchill had known since April 1941, from Enigma decrypts at Bletchley Park, that Hitler was planning to invade the Soviet Union. He tried to warn Joseph Stalin through the British ambassador Stafford Cripps, but Stalin did not trust him. The night before the invasion on the 22nd of June 1941, Churchill alluded to his own anti-communist past by saying to Colville: "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil".

  In August 1941, Churchill crossed the Atlantic for the first time during the war and met Roosevelt in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. On the 14th of August they issued the Atlantic Charter, a joint statement that became the inspiration for the 1942 Declaration by United Nations, itself the basis of the UN founded in 1945.

  The fall of Singapore to Japan on the 15th of February 1942 hit Churchill hard. He called it "the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British military history". On the same day, the Kriegsmarine executed its "Channel Dash", a humiliating blow to British naval prestige. The shock of Tobruk's fall, with 35,000 troops surrendering on the 21st of June 1942, Churchill described as, apart from Singapore, "the heaviest blow" he received in the war.

  The Bengal famine of 1943 remains the most contested chapter of Churchill's wartime leadership. A combination of factors, including the loss of rice imports from Burma, wartime inflation, flooding, and crop disease, contributed to the deaths of an estimated 2.1 to 3.8 million people. Churchill's government was criticised for refusing to approve adequate grain imports, with the official explanation citing acute shipping shortages. When the British government recognised the full extent of the famine in September 1943, Churchill ordered the transportation of 130,000 tons of grain and the cabinet agreed to send 200,000 tons by year's end. Viceroy Lord Wavell complained to Churchill in October 1944 that "the vital problems of India are being treated by His Majesty's Government with neglect, even sometimes with hostility and contempt". The impact of British policies on the death toll is still debated by historians.

• 8. After Victory

  ›

  The Conservatives lost the 1945 general election despite the Allied victory, and Churchill became Leader of the Opposition. He used the period to write and to speak. In one speech during the developing Cold War he publicly warned of an "iron curtain" of Soviet influence across Europe. He promoted the idea of European unity. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, largely for his historical writings and for his wartime speeches.

  Churchill returned as prime minister after the 1951 general election. His second term focused heavily on foreign affairs, particularly the Anglo-American relationship and the remaining shape of the British Empire, with India now independent. At home, the government's notable domestic achievement was an extensive housebuilding programme that delivered results well beyond initial expectations.

  Declining health forced his resignation in 1955, though he remained a Member of Parliament until 1964. He died on the 24th of January 1965 and was given a state funeral. His body lay at Westminster Hall, and his funeral drew heads of state from across the world.

  Historians rank Churchill among the greatest British prime ministers. He is viewed as a victorious wartime leader who played an integral role in defending liberal democracy against fascism. He is also assessed as a staunch imperialist who has been criticised for comments on race and for some wartime decisions, including area bombing. The four volumes of Marlborough: His Life and Times, completed during his political wilderness, stand as evidence that even in his darkest professional years, Churchill kept working, kept writing, and kept preparing for whatever came next.