Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace in 1874, the grandson of a duke and the son of a brilliant Tory politician who died young of syphilis. He failed his way into Sandhurst, served as a cavalry officer in Cuba, India, the Sudan and South Africa (where he was captured by the Boers and escaped), and entered Parliament at twenty-six. Across the next forty years he held every major Cabinet office — President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty (twice), Chancellor of the Exchequer — and was widely considered finished after the Gallipoli disaster of 1915 and his opposition to Indian self-rule in the 1930s. The 'wilderness years' of 1929–39 he spent writing histories and warning about Hitler. On 10 May 1940, the day Germany invaded the Low Countries, he became Prime Minister at sixty-five. The speeches that followed — 'blood, toil, tears and sweat'; 'we shall fight on the beaches'; 'their finest hour'; 'never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few' — held a country alone against fascism for the year before the United States entered the war. He lost the 1945 election in a landslide, returned as PM from 1951 to 1955, wrote a six-volume history of the Second World War that won him the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature, and died in 1965 at ninety. He was given the largest state funeral in British history.
All Figures
British Prime Minister · War Leader · Author
Winston Churchill
1,874 CE – 1,965 CE
The aristocratic war correspondent turned politician whose 1940 oratory held Britain alone against Hitler — and whose six-volume history of the war won him the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Lifetime
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