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Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, British politician and writer, is best known as his country’s prime minister during World War II. In 1940, when Britain looked defeated, he defiantly rejected any deal with Nazi Germany. Determined to fight on, he inspired his people with oratory that called upon them to be heroes. At the time of supreme crisis, he promised nothing “but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
Churchill’s lifetime spanned a period that began when Britain’s prestige was near its peak and ended when Britain had fallen to the level of a second-rank power and its empire had broken up. Churchill enjoyed a long, multifaceted, and sometimes controversial career. It started in the 1890s when he was a glory-seeking cavalry officer and journalist in India and concluded in the 1950s when as an old man he headed the British government in the first decade of the Cold War. In 1953 Queen Elizabeth II knighted him, and ten years later the U.S. president John F. Kennedy made him the first honorary American citizen.
Egocentric, energetic, and extravagant, Churchill often appeared larger than life. Although short in stature and unathletic in build, he seemed a giant. His image was that of a jaunty, confident, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking, bulldog-obstinate John Bull. Few people knew that he suffered from debilitating bouts of depression that he called his “black dog.” Other than his wife Clementine, he had few close friends.
By birth, Churchill was an aristocrat, although without a personal fortune. Like most boys of his social class, he grew up spending more time with his beloved nanny than with his aloof parents. His politician father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a younger son of the Duke of Marlborough. His mother, born Jennie Jerome, was the glamorous daughter of a wealthy American. After doing poorly at Harrow school, the young Churchill attended the military academy at Sandhurst.
Churchill’s time as an army officer was brief. He saw combat on the Indian frontier and in the Sudan, was a military observer in Cuba during conflict between Spanish troops and nationalist rebels, and during the South African (Boer) War was taken prisoner by the Boers and escaped. Except for a few months during World War I, when he commanded a battalion in France, he was a civilian the rest of his life, but a civilian who by holding political office commanded navies and armies.
In 1900 Churchill was elected to the House of Commons as a member of the Conservative Party. Objecting to Conservative proposals for protective tariffs, he soon switched to the Liberal Party, which defended free trade. The renegade Churchill was rewarded with increasingly important offices, beginning with the number two position in the ministry for colonies. He earned a reputation as a social reformer while president of the Board of Trade and home secretary. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I he became first lord of the admiralty. The failure in 1915 of a naval attack on Ottoman Turkey, followed by a disastrously unsuccessful land invasion at Gallipoli, led to Churchill’s resignation. Demoted to the office of chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, he soon left the government altogether. Two years later he returned to high office as minister for munitions. Subsequently, he served his friend Prime Minister David Lloyd George as secretary of state for war and air and as colonial minister. Lloyd George’s coalition government fell in 1922. By this time, the Liberal Party was divided and dying. Churchill made his way back to the Conservative Party. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was generous to the returning prodigal: Churchill served as chancellor of the exchequer from 1924 to 1929. This would be the last office he would hold for a decade. A multiparty national government dominated by the Conservatives, which came to power in 1931, kept Churchill on the back benches.
In the 1930s Churchill took positions that undermined his credibility. He led the fight against Baldwin’s proposal to grant India a large degree of political self-government. Churchill was determined to preserve the integrity of the British Empire. When Edward VIII insisted on marrying Wallis Simpson, a divorced American woman, Baldwin and the leaders of the other political parties demanded that the king abdicate. In contrast, Churchill wanted the king to keep his crown. Such eccentric policies isolated Churchill. He was regarded as impetuous and unreliable. This reputation made it difficult for Churchill to get a hearing when he warned about German rearmament and fiercely attacked appeasement of Adolf Hitler.
Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 vindicated Churchill. He was reappointed first lord of the admiralty. When the war went badly, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned, and Churchill at age sixty-five replaced him. He assumed this office on the day that the German armies began their successful invasion of France and the Low Countries. After France sued for peace, Britain had no major allies until 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and Japan attacked United States possessions in the Pacific. Churchill took an active role in planning military campaigns. Remembering the enormous casualties of World War I, he favored a Mediterranean strategy and delayed a cross-Channel invasion of Nazi-occupied France. Despite his age and the discomfort of World War II aircraft, Churchill traveled frequently to confer with other political leaders. In addition to meetings with President Franklin Roosevelt in North America, he participated in other so-called summit conferences at Casablanca, Cairo, Teheran, and Yalta. Although fiercely anti-Communist, he developed a working relationship with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin.
Churchill’s party lost the general election held in 1945. Although he was over seventy, his political career was not over. In 1946 he made his famous “iron curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri, one of the defining moments that marked the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. During the 1940s Churchill favored some kind of limited economic and political unity for Western Europe. From 1951 to 1955 he again served as prime minister, retiring in his eighties.
Outside politics Churchill earned a reputation as a writer. Always in need of money, he wrote prolifically, mostly history and biography, often dictated to secretaries and researched by assistants. Some of his books first appeared serialized in newspapers. His most important books include a biography of his father (1906); a history of World War I entitled The World Crisis (1923–1931); an autobiography up to the year 1904, entitled My Early Life (1930); a history of his ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough (1933–1938); a collection of biographical essays, Great Contemporaries (1937); The Second World War (1948–1954); and his History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–1958). In 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Bibliography:
- Addison, P. (1993). Churchill on the home front, 1900–1955. London: Pimlico.
- Best, G. (2001). Churchill: A study in greatness. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Churchill, R., & Gilbert, M. (1966–1988). Winston S. Churchill. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Gilbert, M. (1991). Churchill: A life. New York: Henry Holt.
- Herman, A. (2008). Gandhi & Churchill: The epic rivalry that destroyed an empire and forged our age. New York: Bantam.
- James, R. R. (1970). Churchill: A study in failure, 1900–1939. New York: World.
- Jenkins, R. (2001). Churchill: A biography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
- Lukacs, J. (1999). Five days in London, May 1940. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Moore, R. J. (1979). Churchill, Cripps, and India, 1939–1945. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Ramsden, J. (2002). Man of the century: Winston Churchill and his legend since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Rasor, E. L. (2000). Winston S. Churchill, 1874–1965: A comprehensive historiography and annotated bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
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