Winston Churchill

Their life

Half a century of spectacular failures — Gallipoli, the wilderness years — prepared the one man who would not negotiate with catastrophe in 1940. He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

Known for

• Prime Minister during World War II
• 'We shall fight on the beaches' oratory
• Rallying Britain during the Blitz
• Wilderness-years warnings about Hitler
• Nobel Prize in Literature, 1953
• 'Iron Curtain' speech, 1946

The road they walked

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace, into the aristocratic Spencer-Churchill family, the son of the mercurial Tory politician Lord Randolph Churchill and the American-born socialite Jennie Jerome. He was an indifferent student at Harrow, found his footing at Sandhurst, and built a young reputation as a cavalry officer and war correspondent, seeing action in Cuba, on India's Northwest Frontier, in Sudan at the Battle of Omdurman, and in the Boer War, where a daring escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria made him a minor celebrity before he had turned twenty-six.

He entered Parliament in 1900 and spent the next four decades in a political career of extraordinary range and volatility, crossing the floor between Conservative and Liberal parties, serving as President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, and First Lord of the Admiralty. It was in that last post that he championed the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, a catastrophic failure that cost him his position and haunted his reputation for years. He held further cabinet posts through the 1920s, including Chancellor of the Exchequer, but by the 1930s he was largely out of power, an isolated backbencher warning, often to an indifferent House of Commons, about German rearmament and the danger of Adolf Hitler.

When Neville Chamberlain's government collapsed in May 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister at sixty-five, inheriting a country facing invasion. His wartime speeches to Parliament and over the BBC — promising blood, toil, tears, and sweat, vowing to fight on the beaches, calling the air campaign of 1940 Britain's finest hour — became instruments of national resolve as much as rhetoric. He led the coalition government through the Blitz, forged the alliance with Roosevelt and later Stalin, and helped shape the postwar order at Yalta and Potsdam, even as British voters, weary of the old order, voted him out of office in July 1945 before the war in the Pacific had ended.

How their story ended

Churchill died on 24 January 1965, at the age of ninety, following a severe stroke; he had suffered declining health for years after a series of earlier strokes and heart trouble. He was given a state funeral, the first for a non-royal Briton in decades, with cranes along the Thames dipping their jibs in salute as his coffin passed by barge — a farewell to a man who had, by then, outlived nearly all of his political contemporaries and much of the empire he had spent his life defending.

In their words

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