Sir Winston Leonard Spencer CHURCHILL

First Generation

      1. Sir Winston Leonard Spencer CHURCHILL ¹  was born²  on 30 Nov 1874 in Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, England. He died on 24 Jan 1965 in London, England. He was buried in St. Martins's Church, Bladon, near Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England.

Bio from: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/churchil.htm

Statesman, historian, and biographer, whose five years of war leadership (1940-45) secured

him a central place in modern British history. Churchill is widely considered the greatest

political figure in 20th-century Britain. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. In was

an open secret that he would have preferred the Nobel Peace Prize. Churchill's career was

anything but predictable: he supported the Zionist movement in Palestine (1921-22), during

the Abdication crisis (1926) he was loyal to Edward VIII, and during the 1945 election

campaign he tried to brand Labour as a totalitarian party.

'Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to

him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit

uplands. But if we fail, the whole world, including the Unites States, including all that we have

known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and

perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves

to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for

a thousand years, men will say, "This was their finest hour."' (Churchill in his speech on June

18, 1940)

Winston Churchill was the son of conservative politician Lord Randolph Churchill and his

American wife, Jennie Jerome, and a direct descendant from the first Duke of Marlborough

(1650-1722). Lady Randolph's second son, Jack, was born in 1880, and rumors circulated

that he had a different father from Winston Churchill. "George Moore, the Anglo-Irish novelist,

said she had 200 lovers, but apart from anything else the number is suspiciously round," Roy

Jenkins wrote in his biography on Churchill. "I loved her dearly — but at a distance," Churchill

later said of his mother in MY EARLY LIFE (1930). In school Churchill was at the bottom of his

class. Nothing showed that he would became "the largest human being of our time" (Isaiah

Berlin). Physically he was not a big man - at 5-foot-8 he was shorter than Harry Truman.

Churchill attended Harrow and Sandhurst, from which he graduated twentieth in a class of

130. Shortly after his father's death in 1895, he was commissioned in the Fourth Hussars. He

soon obtained a leave, and worked during the Cuban war as a reporter for the London Daily

Graphic.

"It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic." (from The

Malakand Field Force)

From 1896 to 1897 Churchill served as a soldier and journalist in India, and wrote the basis

for THE STORY OF THE MALAKAND FIELD FORCE (1898). "Writing is an adventure,"

Churchill once said. "To begin with, it is a toy and amusement. Then it becomes a mistress,

then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase it that just as you are

about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."

In 1898 Churchill fought at the battle of Omdurman in Sudan, depicting his experiences in

THE RIVER WAR, AN ACCOUNT OF THE RECONQUEST OF THE SUDAN (1899).

Churchill's several books dealing with his early career include MY AFRICAN JOURNEY (1908)

and MY EARLY LIFE (1930). Churchill resigned his commission in 1899, and was assigned to

cover the Boer War for the London Morning Post. His adventures, capture by the Boers, and

a daring escape, made Churchill celebrity and hero on his return to England in 1900.

In 1900 Churchill was first elected to Parliament. He switched from conservatives to Liberal

Party in 1904. In 1908 he married Clementine Ogilvy Hozier, with whom he had one son and

three daughters. This relationship brought much happiness and security throughout

Churchill's lifetime. Between 1906 and 1911 Churchill served in various governmental posts,

and was appointed lord of the admiralty in 1911. As home secretary (1910-11) he used troops

against strikers in South Wales.

After the outbreak of First World War he supported the Dardannelles Campaign, an operation

against the Turks. He had encouraged the development of such materiel as tank, and was

generally credited with the British Fleet's preparedness in August 1914. But abortive

expeditions to Antwerp and Gallipoli and the failed action at the Dardanelles did great harm to

Churchill reputation and career. Reduced in 1915 to minor office as Chancellor of the Duchy

of Lancaster, he resigned. Churchill rejoined the Army, and rose to the rank of colonel. In

1917 he was appointed Lloyd George's minister of munition, subsequently becoming the state

secretary for war and air (1918-21), and colonial secretary (1921-22). During the postwar

years he was active in support of the Whites (anti-Bolsheviks) in Russia.

At the election of 1922 Churchill was defeated as an Anti-Socialist. A rabid anti-Bolshevik, he

further alienated critics by a third abortive military expedition - to help the White Russians on

the Murman Coast. He left Parliament in 1922, and returned to the House as a Conservative.

From this period he is remembered for his role as chancellor of the exchequer (1924-29) for

the part he played in defeating the General strike of 1926 as an opponent of organized labour

when the latter came into direct conflict with the principle of public order and government. In

1923 Lord Alfred Douglas accused Churchill of having arranged the wartime death of Lord

Kitchener. Douglas's source was a bogus captain who had been certified as a lunatic. Much

later he addressed a sonnet to Winston Churchill. False news annoyed Churchill but also

BBC - he saw it as a rival to his own British Gazette, edited from his official address at

Downing Street.

Out of office, Churchill began writing THE WORLD CRISIS, which appeared in 6 volumes

(1923-31). The work was attacked by the eminent poet and critic Herbert Read in English

Prose Style (1928). He described Churchill prose as being high-sounding, redundant, falsely

eloquent and declamatory, sharing his view with the younger post-war generation of writers

who praised the virtues of simplicity. In 1924 Churchill was elected to Parliament, and

appointed chancellor of the Exchequer. Churchill's defense of the gold was criticized by the

economist John Maynard Keynes, who foresaw that such policy would drop coal prices

significantly. It lead to conditions which eventually provoked the general strike of 1926. Later,

during World War II, Keynes was one of Churchill's economic advisers.

After Conservative defeat in 1929, Churchill was again out of office. His absence from

government lasted a decade. During this time he wrote a four-volume biography of his

ancestor, MARLBOROUGH:

HIS LIFE AND TIMES (1933-1938).

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an

enigma." (from a radio broadcast, October 1, 1939)

With the outbreak of World War II Churchill was appointed first lord of the Admiralty. On May

10, 1940, he became Prime Minister, and established close ties with U.S. President Franklin

D. Roosevelt. His radio speeches strenghtened the nation's determination to win the war. "We

shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. . . . We shall fight on the beaches . . . we

shall fight in the fields and in the streets . . . we shall never surrender." In 2001, some sixty

years later, President George W. Bush used an adaptation of these words in his speeches

after a terrorist attack against World Trade Center on September 11. In November 1943

Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met in Teheran and at the meeting Churchill presented Stalin

with a sword of honor for the people of Stalingrad. The Yalta meeting with Roosevelt and

Stalin resulted in the dissection of Europe into opposing political jurisdictions. His strategic

misjudgment was blamed for the wartime success of Germany in Africa, Norway, and the

Aegean. He had difficulties to tolerate Charles de Gaulle, and he told to a friend: "Of all the

crosses I have to bear, the heaviest is the Cross of Lorraine." During the war Churchill was

relatively healthy but in 1943 and 1944 he suffered pneumonia; also his long, official meals

with Stalin, which could take four-five hours, gave him stomach pains. On 8 May Churchill

announced the unconditional surrender of Germany. His Conservative party was defeated by

the Labour party in the 1945 election, but he continued as Opposition leader in the House of

Commons: against Indian independence, and in favor of the United Nations, a unified Europe,

and manufacture of the hydrogen bomb.

During the war Churchill also had time to support the idea of C.K. Ogden for an international

language, Basic English. "Basic English is a carefully wrought plan for transactions of

practical business and interchange of ideas, a medium of understanding to many races and

an aid to the building of a new structure for preserving peace." (Churchill at Harvard, 1943)

Churchill emerged from WW II as a national hero, but was out of the office for several years.

However, he led the Conservative opposition, and remained active as a political thinker. A

sign of the beginning of the Cold War was Churchill's famous 'Iron Curtain' speech in Fulton,

Missouri, in spring 1946.

Churchill's history THE SECOND WORLD WAR appeared in six volumes (1948-54). Churchill

had once predicted that history would treat him kindly because he himself would write it. The

work was received with mixed critics, praised for its grandeur, but Volume 2 (the period

through 1941) was considered poorly arranged, and Volume 5 (through 1944) seemed to most

critics a falling-off from earlier volumes.

"The quality of Churchill's volumes on the Second World War is that of his whole life. His

world in built upon the primacy of public over private relationships, upon the supreme value of

action, of the battle between simple good and simple evil, between life and death; but, above

all, battle." (Isaiah Berlin in The Proper Study of Mankind, 1998)

In 1951 Churchill became prime minister, and was knighted in 1953. Next year he was

acclaimed by the Queen and Parliament as 'the greatest living Briton'. Churchill's efforts to

bring an end to the first phase of the Cold War by a summit conference between himself,

Eisenhower and Stalin (1952-55) turned out to be fruitless. He resigned from the prime

minister's office in 1955 and was succeeded by Anthony Eden. He had suffered a paralytic

stroke a few year before, and Lord Moran, his physician, gave him some stimulant, perhaps

amphetamine. It is possible that Churchill took drugs, "Dr. Moran's green pills", before

important political meetings. His diet was not healthy - he was overweight, did not take any

unnecessary steps in his old days, and his servants helped him to dress and undress. After

his retirement he published the monumental A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING

PEOPLE (1956-58), which mostly dealt with politics and war. At Westerham, Kent, Churchill

concentrated in painting, masonry, and horse racing. He frequently dictated letters to his

secretaries half-dressed and often roamed around his rooms at Chartwell nude when he

awoke. During this last period of his life, when he was not in the center of political power, he

also suffered from depression.

"I am ready to meet my Maker," Churchill said on his 75th birthday. "Whether my Maker is

prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter." Churchill died on January 24, 1965,

after suffering cerebral thrombosis. Later historians have been critical of Churchill's actions

and relationships with world leaders, and the opening of British government files in the 1980s

have brought new material into daylight. The conviction that Churchill was among the most

important men in modern history have remained unchanged.

Winston married Clementine HOZIER  on 12 Sep 1908 in St. Margaret's, Westminster, London, England. Clementine was born on 1 Apr 1885 in Mayfair, London, England. She died on 12 Dec 1977 in Princes Gate, Knightsbridge, London, England. She was buried in St. Martins's Church, Bladon, near Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England.

Sources

  1. Steve Riddle, World Connect Project pages of Steve Riddle  (http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=sriddle).

  2. Find A Grave  (http://www.findagrave.com/).