Winston Churchill

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1940–1945, 1951–1955)

• Born: November 30, 1874
• Birthplace: Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, England
• Died: January 24, 1965
• Place of death: London, England

One of the United Kingdom’s greatest prime ministers and war leaders and one of the twentieth century’s greatest public figures, Churchill was tremendously influential in both war and peace.

Early Life

Winston Churchill was born in Oxfordshire, England; he was two months premature. He was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895), a prominent Conservative politician and a descendant of the duke of Marlborough (1650–1722), a statesman and one of the greatest military commanders in history. Blenheim Palace, where Winston was born, was the gift of a grateful nation to the duke of Marlborough for the first of his famous victories at Blenheim (1704) in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). Winston grew up within this background of military glory and patriotism and always had it in mind to preserve and to enhance the grandeur of the British Empire. Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, was the daughter of Leonard Jerome, described as an “American freebooter” and the “King of Wall Street.” Winston adored his mother, although she shared little of her fashionable life with him. In his efforts to shape American opinion during World War II and afterward, he made the most of his American ancestry. He worshiped and stoutly defended his reckless, flamboyant, and self-destructive father even writing a biography of Randolph (1906) in justification of his father’s life. All these qualities—filial piety, loyalty, pugnacity, grandiloquence, and enormous courage—were to make of Churchill a unique figure in the twentieth century, for he was almost a throwback to an earlier age, more like an eighteenth-century soldier, statesman, and man of letters than a modern politician.

Churchill was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, the latter a school for the training of military officers. From the beginning of his career, he combined his craving for military exploits with a talent for journalism. Thus, in 1895, he took a leave from the military to report on the war in Cuba for London’s The Daily Telegraph. After serving in both India and South Africa, Churchill was assigned in 1899 to cover the South African War (Boer War) for The Morning Post. The story of his capture, imprisonment, and escape catapulted him to the forefront of British journalists. In these early adventures, Churchill was already the man he would become as prime minister: rambunctious, intrepid, a bit of a bully, but nearly always an engaging and inspiring leader and writer. He thrived on words, with his favorite mode of composition being dictation, in which he could galvanize himself and his readers with a vibrant language that seemed inseparable from the man himself.

In his early career, Churchill went from success to success: He was elected to Parliament as a Conservative in 1900 and appointed undersecretary for the colonies in the cabinet of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman; he also served as president of the Board of Trade (1908–1910) and as home secretary (1910–1911). In the latter post, he initiated important labor and pension legislation. In 1911, Churchill became first lord of the admiralty and aggressively expanded and modernized the fleet. With the devastating failure of the Dardanelles campaign (1915) in World War I, however, he suffered not only his first major defeat but also a far more serious blow: He became branded as a reckless adventurer, a loner in public life whose career might end as disastrously as his father’s, whose life had ended sadly in a series of illnesses and rages brought on by syphilis.

Churchill’s early setback was by no means a mere misfortune. He had often acted arbitrarily and outside the boundaries of normal party and governmental conduct. Elected as a Conservative, he switched to the Liberal Party, then switched back again to the Conservatives. As first lord of the admiralty, he often ran roughshod over seasoned naval officers—sometimes with cause, sometimes only for the misguided gratification of his own ego. To many of his political colleagues, therefore, Churchill was not one to be trusted; he was out to serve only himself. Although the defeat in the Dardanelles was not exclusively Churchill’s fault (indeed, credible arguments can be advanced that his military plans were sound), his conspicuous touting of himself inevitably provoked the vehement reaction against him.

Life’s Work

It became Churchill’s life’s work not only to rehabilitate his reputation but also to fulfill his early promise and destiny: to become prime minister and supreme military leader. Churchill’s talents were not ignored, but in various cabinet positions he was not allowed to get near the center of power. He was, successively, minister of munitions (1917), secretary of state for war and for air (1918–1921), colonial secretary (1921–1922), and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924–1929). None of these offices required Churchill’s broad-based talent for mobilizing a whole nation during periods of crisis, and he lacked real interest in domestic matters. From 1929 to 1939, he had no government position. As a member of Parliament he was a steadfast anticommunist and an early if not always consistent opponent of the fascists. However, by the time of Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” capitulation to Adolf Hitler at Munich in the summer of 1938, Churchill had become fixed in his country’s imagination as the prophet who had foreseen Great Britain’s involvement in World War II and who had demanded military preparedness. Whereas his vitriolic “empire first” speeches had once seemed dangerous and ridiculous affectations belonging to an earlier age, now his evocations of moral and military grandeur spoke eloquently to a nation that needed to be aroused to fight for its own freedom.

At various points in the 1930s, Churchill, physically and politically, had looked like an old man. War, however, energized him. He was sixty-six when he became prime minister in May of 1940. His appearance no longer seemed merely overweight. He now had the heft of a powerful man. There was a spring in his voice and in his step. His famous “V for victory” signs and his boyish grins bespoke a person who was reborn, and yet a man of years, of broad experience, equipped better than anyone else to stay the course and to excite a nation to arms. Just as he had sounded the alarm of war, so he now broadcast the call to victory. There is ample documented evidence that his public display of confidence was no sham. To be sure, he had his moments of despair, but observers of his private life testify to a person who was irrepressible, a demon for work, a demanding—sometimes unreasonable—chief executive. He drove his staff as mercilessly as he drove himself. Churchill required results and was always quick to take action even at the risk of defeat. His task was to spur the government and the people onward.

As prime minister in time of war, Churchill’s independence was a signal strength. Although a Conservative, he had never been much of a party man, and his claim to be serving the whole nation was never better supported than during the war. Although he opposed communism and socialism, some of his wartime measures heralded the welfare state Great Britain would become after the war. Loath to grant independence to any part of the British Empire, his vigorous prosecution of the war inevitably strengthened the successful movement of a free India.

It came as something of a shock for Churchill to be turned out of office at the end of World War II. In retrospect, however, it seems clear that the voters knew his finest hour had been during a time of military need. Now the Labour Party would set about putting into effect a postwar economy that would make good on promises of increased social security, health benefits, and other domestic improvements desperately desired by a people weary of war.

Significance

Churchill was a world figure. With Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, he helped shape the postwar world. Present at Yalta (1945) and other important wartime meetings, he shared Roosevelt’s terrible responsibility in coming to some kind of terms with the victorious Red Army. Although Churchill is remembered for having been a staunch anticommunist, his treatment of Stalin was inconsistent. He seems to have thought on occasion that he could charm the Soviet leader into taking a moderate, peaceful view of postwar politics. Sometimes Churchill seems to have been cynical in suggesting to Stalin that there was an equitable way of dividing up Europe to the satisfaction of all the wartime allies. In truth, for all of his brilliance, Churchill had a weak hand to play as the representative of a declining empire and perhaps thought that he could make do with guile and with ingratiation.

Churchill’s disappointment over the course of postwar events is readily apparent in his famous Fulton, Missouri, speech (1946), in which he coined the term “Iron Curtain” to describe the brutal way Stalin had cut Eastern and Central Europe off from the “free world.” Churchill’s rhetoric crystallized what many Americans and Western Europeans had not yet articulated, and his view of the menace of postwar communism came to dominate American foreign policy especially in the formulation of the “containment” strategy by which American governments attempted to prevent the spread of communism throughout the globe. Elected prime minister twice after the war (in 1951 and 1955), Churchill was not a particularly effective leader, although his august position as world statesman was unassailable.

Whatever Churchill did not win through politics or through war, he won through the word. His many books consolidated his position in history. In 1953, he won the Nobel Prize for his writing and oratory. His six-volume history The Second War (1948–1954) and his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–1958) made him appear as a figure for the ages. These books are as much myth as they are history, for Churchill had no compunction about revising the past to portray his own part in it as illustriously as possible. Yet the books are also reflective of a great man who was able to stamp history in his own image and to make his word stand for the deed.

Bibliography

Addison, Paul. Churchill: The Unexpected Hero. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.

Best, Geoffrey. Churchill: A Study in Greatness. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

Bonham Carter, Violet. Winston Churchill: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Harcourt, 1965. Print.

Cannadine, David, and Roland Quinault, eds. Winston Churchill in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print.

Churchill, Randolph, and Martin Gilbert. Winston S. Churchill. 8 vols. London: Heinemann, 1966–1988. Print.

Churchill, Winston. The Complete Speeches of Winston Churchill. Ed. R. R. James. New York: Chelsea, 1974. Print.

Churchill, Winston. My Early Life, 1874-1904. 1930. Reprint. New York: Simon, 1996. Print.

Coughlin, Con. Churchill's First War: Young Winston at War with the Afghans. New York: Dunne, 2013. Print.

Keegan, John. Winston Churchill: A Penguin Life. New York: Viking, 2002. Print.

Taylor, A. J. P., et al. Churchill Revised: A Critical Assessment. New York: Dial, 1969. Print.

Thompson, R. W. Generalissimo Churchill. New York: Scribner, 1973. Print.