Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill was born in 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, into the aristocratic Spencer-Churchill family. His grandfather was the Duke of Marlborough, his father the Conservative politician Lord Randolph Churchill, and his mother, Jennie Jerome, was American. In his youth he attended Harrow School and then the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, before setting out on a military career.

After graduating he became a cavalry officer and, as a war correspondent, moved through India, Sudan, and South Africa, witnessing many campaigns. His capture and dramatic escape during the Boer War in South Africa began to make his name. This period also launched his lifelong writing career, as he turned what he saw and heard into several books on war.

In 1900 Churchill was first elected to the House of Commons, and from then on he was a long-standing figure in British politics. He crossed between the Conservative and Liberal parties and held many offices, including President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. During the First World War he resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty over the failure of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns, served for a time at the front, and saw his fortunes rise and fall.

Between the two world wars he was for a time out of the centre of power, and through the 1930s repeatedly spoke out on rearmament and policy toward Germany. In 1940, with the war going badly, he became Prime Minister and formed a coalition government, leading Britain in steadfast resistance, cooperating with allies such as the United States and the Soviet Union, and taking part in Allied summit conferences at Tehran and Yalta to coordinate strategy against the Axis powers.

After victory in Europe, his Conservative Party lost the general election, and Churchill stepped down as Prime Minister to become Leader of the Opposition. In 1946 he delivered his speech in the United States describing the division of Europe as an “Iron Curtain,” regarded as one of the defining phrases of Cold War rhetoric. In 1951 he became Prime Minister again, and in 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his historical and biographical works.

In his later years Churchill continued to write diligently and took pleasure in painting, leaving behind a large body of work. In 1955 he resigned as Prime Minister for reasons including his health, and in 1965 he died in London at the age of ninety; Britain gave him a state funeral. However divided later judgements may be, he remains one of the most far-reaching figures in twentieth-century British and international politics.