Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was wrong about a great many things over fifty years and right about the one that mattered most. Born at Blenheim in 1874 to an erratic Tory politician and an American heiress, he was a poor schoolboy, got into Sandhurst on the third attempt, and made his name as a soldier-journalist in Cuba, India, the Sudan and South Africa, where he was captured by the Boers and escaped, which won him a seat in parliament at twenty-five. He crossed to the Liberals over free trade in 1904 and crossed back twenty years later, and held almost every senior office. The record before 1940 is what his critics use. Gallipoli in 1915 cost him the Admiralty and 46,000 Allied dead; the return to gold at the prewar parity in 1925 as chancellor produced deflation and the General Strike; he opposed Indian self-government in terms that were extreme even for his party, and his conduct during the Bengal famine of 1943 is still argued about. He spent the 1930s out of office warning about German rearmament, largely alone and largely disbelieved. He became prime minister on 10 May 1940, the day Germany invaded the Low Countries, and his contribution in the following year was to refuse a negotiated peace when the cabinet was seriously considering one, and to say so in speeches that gave the refusal a public form. He lost the 1945 election in a landslide while the Potsdam conference was still sitting. He returned in 1951, and died in 1965. He also wrote for a living throughout, produced some fifty volumes of history and memoir, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 — partly for the six-volume account of the war he had just directed, which shaped how it was understood for a generation because he got there first.
- Lived: 1874 CE – 1965 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: prime_minister, orator, historian
