Winston Churchill

Britain’s Prime Minister and inspirational leader during World War II, Sir Winston Churchill is regarded as one of the country’s greatest ever statesmen and the greatest Briton ever.

Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born on the 30th November 1874 at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. A descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, Churchill was a member of the same aristocratic Spencer family as Princess Diana and son of prominent politician Lord Randolph Churchill.

Winston Churchill was educated at Harrow before joining the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Churchill graduated at the age of 20 and embarked on an eventful military career, serving in India and Africa. While in South Africa, serving as a war correspondent, Churchill was taken prisoner by the Boers. Churchill escaped and managed to travel some 300 miles of enemy territory, despite a bounty on his head, back to the British where he was greeted as a national hero.

When he returned to Britain, Churchill stood for parliament in the 1900 election, switching parties from the Conservatives to the Liberals during his early ministerial career. Even in his early days, Churchill was remembered for his oratorical speeches in Parliament and in 1911 became the First Lord of the Admiralty, a post he held throughout World War One. During WWI, Churchill was much criticised for his involvement in the planning and execution of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915.

The years between the wars are seen as Churchill’s wilderness years, as he was increasingly ostracised in Parliament and found himself in ill health. During the 1930s, as Fascism gathered pace in Germany and Italy, Churchill was a lone voice in warning of the dangers of Hitler.

WWII was to become Churchill’s ‘walk with destiny’, as he himself later wrote. After the collapse of Chamberlain’s government, Churchill was appointed as Prime Minister of a coalition government. As Britain’s wartime leader, based in secret underground tunnels beneath Whitehall, Churchill galvanised the British spirit in the face of overwhelming odds. Churchill’s rousing war time speeches are now legendary, describing the aerial Battle of Britain as ‘so much owed to so few’ and spurring Britain’s defence saying, ‘we shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight them in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight them in the hills, we shall never surrender.’

After the war, Churchill was defeated in the 1945 election and was forced out of office. The British electorate, considering that although Churchill was a great leader in war, was not the man to lead in peacetime. Churchill served a second term as Prime Minister in 1951 but retired from office in 1955. During his lifetime, Sir Winston Churchill’s many honours included Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, membership of the Imperial Privy Council, Knight of the Garter and in 1963 he became an Honorary Citizen of the United States. In a BBC poll in 2002, the British public voted Sir Winston Churchill the Greatest Ever Briton.

Churchill died on 29th January 1965, he was granted a state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral and is buried in a small church in the village of Bladon in Oxfordshire, not far from where he was born.