Conservative prime minister of the United Kingdom, 1940–45 and 1951–55. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill came to prominence as a soldier and author before the turn of the century, entering Parliament in 1900 and rising to home secretary in 1910. From 1911 to 1915 he was first lord of the Admiralty, and from 1924 to 1929 chancellor of the exchequer. Widely distrusted in the 1930s as a hot head, he warned against appeasing the fascist powers and returned to lead Britain through World War II. After his defeat in the 1945 election he warned of the dangers of Soviet expansion, though when reelected in 1951, he sought to end the Cold War. Churchill believed profoundly in the British Empire, the greatness of Britain, and the necessity of Anglo-American friendship. He built and sustained this alliance with his wartime speeches and diplomacy, and personified the determination and victory of the Allies.

Churchill was born November 30, 1874. Son of an American heiress, Jeanette (“Jennie”) Jerome, and Lord Randolph Churchill, a Conservative politician, Churchill followed a career shaped by his parents. His father ignored him, and Churchill’s relentless ambition and bouts with depression are thought to have owed much to his need to vindicate himself. He attended Harrow from 1888 to 1892, where he excelled in subjects that interested him but did poorly in those that did not, and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst from 1893 to 1895, which he found more congenial. He joined the Fourth Hussars, a cavalry regiment, and from 1896 to 1898 was posted to India, where he saw action on the North-West Frontier, an experience that provided the material for his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898). Throughout his life, Churchill needed the income that his unceasing writing provided.

In 1898 Churchill’s mother arranged his transfer to General Horatio Herbert Kitchner’s army in the Sudan, which he joined in time to participate in the famous cavalry charge at the battle of Omdurman. In the fall of 1899 he went as a newspaper correspondent to South Africa, where the Boer War had just broken out. While accompanying an armored train into enemy territory, he was captured by the Boers. He soon escaped and made his way back to British territory, and hence to Britain, where he received a hero’s welcome. He stood at Oldham as a Conservative in October 1900 and was elected. Churchill had joined the Conservatives in deference to the memory of his father, but in his support for social reform and a vigorous foreign policy he was closer to the Liberal imperialists. When Joseph Chamberlain s crusade for industrial tariffs split the Conservatives, Churchill, a devout believer in free trade, joined the Liberals in May 1904. When that party came to power in December he received the post of undersecretary of state at the Colonial Office, where he worked to grant responsible government to his former captors in the Transvaal. by accepting the office of president of the Board of Trade. In February 1910, after the Liberals gained a narrow election victory, he was promoted to home secretary, where he was a humanitarian reformer, though he was criticized by Labour for sending troops to a riot at Tonypandy in November 1910. During the Moroccan Crisis in the summer of 1911, triggered by the dispatch of a gun boat to the port of Agadir, he became worried by Germany’s belligerence and the British navy’s deficiencies. In October 1911 he moved to the Admiralty, where he worked to modernize and enlarge the navy. When war broke out in August, 1914, the navy was ready. Churchill’s attempt to hold Antwerp, Belgium, was ridiculed, but the navy transported the British Expeditionary Force to France without loss of life. This success could not counterbalance the failure of the attack on the Dardanelles in 1915. When this campaign led Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher to resign in May 1915, the ensuing political crisis resulted in the formation of a coalition government and Churchill’s fall from power. For five months in 1916 he served in the trenches on the western front. He returned to office as minister for munitions in 1917–18 and held further posts through 1922, but his advocacy of intervention against the Bolsheviks in 1919 seemed to confirm the impression of many that his judgment was
unsound.

From 1922 to 1924 Churchill lost three elections. The Liberal Party was disintegrating and Churchill rejoined the Conservatives in 1925, shortly after being elected for Epping in late 1924. When he returned to Parliament he was brought into the government as chancellor of the exchequer, a post he filled until 1929. Churchill was an indifferent chancellor; his most famous decision was to return Britain to the gold standard in 1925, which further strained the nation’s already laboring economy.

When Labour won the 1929 election Churchill was consigned to the back benches, where he remained until 1939. From 1929 through 1935 he campaigned against the proposal, backed by both Labour and the Conservatives, to grant India central selfgovernment. His description of Gandhi as a “seditious Middle Temple lawyer” alienated Labour; his attacks on Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin lost him the respect of his former colleagues. Churchill believed that “giving up” India would diminish the grandeur of Britain, and he felt an India divided by its religions was unfit for self-government. His intemperate attacks slowed but could not stop the India Bill of 1935. They did, however, deprive him of his remaining credibility. Thus his warnings, which began in 1932, that Germany was rearming and would seek revenge for its loss in 1918 went largely unheard. Churchill was not opposed to revising the Versailles Treaty, which ended World War I, but wanted to do so from a position of strength and Allied unity. From 1932 onward he attacked the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments for their policy of appeasement, but his strictures were not always justified. Given the disparity between Britain’s commitments and resources, a measure of appeasement was inglorious but necessary. Yet the essential fact remains that, far earlier than most, Churchill perceived the true nature of the Nazi regime. After Churchill’s prophetic speech against the Munich Pact on October 5, 1938, he began to win converts. When war broke out in Europe on September 1, 1939, after Germany’s attack on Poland, Chamberlain reluctantly brought Churchill into the government and returned him to the Admiralty. Churchill urged that the war be prosecuted more vigorously, but the April 1940 campaign in Norway, which he backed, was a costly failure. It rebounded on Chamberlain, whose support in Commons was fading. Labour refused to serve in a coalition with him, and as German troops poured into France on May 10, 1940, Churchill became prime minister.

The first year of the war was Churchill’s finest hour. He was a harsh taskmaster and prone to flights of strategy, but he kicked the government into high gear and inspired the nation with his call on May 13 for “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” During the Battle of Britain—Germany’s air assault on the British Isles—which raged over the summer, he spoke repeatedly to the Commons and the world, projecting indomitable purpose and unshakable confidence. This was more than rhetoric. It helped U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt win passage of the Lend-Lease Bill in March 1941. After the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the United States the following December entered the war, Churchill was sure that the defeat of the Axis powers was inevitable.

Churchill was right, but 1942 brought more defeats. Already expelled from Europe, Britain was threatened by German U-boat attacks on the convoys from America and pushed out of its empire east of India by the Japanese, a calamity that Churchill found particularly mortifying. Slowly, though, the resources of the Allies turned the tide. Churchill was always conscious of the need to maintain the alliance, but this meant that, as Britain’s contribution to the war was surpassed by those of the emerging superpowers of the United States and the USSR, he was increasingly overshadowed. Yet in spite of serious disagreements over strategy and the future of the postwar world, the Allies stuck to the task at hand and Churchill, though exhausted and ill, remained the symbol of their determination.

When Germany surrendered unconditionally in May 1945, the coalition government broke up and, to the world’s surprise, Churchill lost the ensuing election. The voters wanted Labour to direct the social reforms promised for the postwar years. From 1945 to 1951 Churchill worked on his war memoirs and allowed the younger figures in the party to refurbish its image. For his part, Churchill urged the creation of a “United States of Europe,” including Germany, to resist the Soviet Union. He thus won a reputation as a founder of the European Union, even though he did not believe Britain was a European nation and did not suggest it should join this new “United States.” Churchill’s greatest cause was Anglo-American unity in the nascent rivalry with the USSR; in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, he warned of the “iron curtain” that had descended across Eastern Europe. Protests were raised around the world against Churchill’s supposed warmongering, but he proved as prescient as he had been in the 1930s. In the election of October 1951 the Conservatives defeated Labour. In many respects it was unfortunate, both for Britain and for Churchill’s reputation, that he served again as prime minister. Old and tired, he suffered from a stroke in 1953 that was concealed from the public. Without the war to provide direction, he allowed the government and nation to drift. At home and in the empire, his aim was essentially to keep things quiet; his return did nothing to puncture the illusions about Britain’s place in the world that victory in the war had fostered. Churchill was created a Knight of the Garter in 1953 and in the same year won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Churchill thought little of the award; he wanted to win the Peace Prize. To the growing exasperation of his colleagues, he remained in office until April 1955, in the hopes of bringing about a four-power meeting with the Soviets and so ending the Cold War, a noble but unrealistic aim. Britain no longer had the necessary power to serve as the world’s arbiter. After Churchill resigned he spent his last years writing his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples and receiving tokens of public recognition. On January 10, 1965, he suffered another stroke. He died two weeks later and was buried at the parish church at Bladon. His postwar successor, Clement Attlee, described him as “the greatest Englishman of our time.”

By the time of his death many of Churchill’s causes had failed or faded. The empire was gone and Britain had lost its greatness. These causes were of the Victorian Age into which Churchill was born; he could not save them. His hopes were anachronisms, but it was the very fact that he belonged to and sympathized with a bygone age that enabled him to rally Britain in the most critical year of 1940. In the course of his long political life he inevitably sustained more defeats and supported more lost causes than he won victories, but his victories helped save the Western democracies and shape the modern world.