who is winston chuchill???

Answer 1

2

Answer 2

1

Answer 3

RIGHT; POSSIBLE DIFFICULTY.
You may not know this but Winston Churchill is a loyer at a market in market harbour.
NOT!!

Answer 4

You have to ask that?

Thats like me asking who was Abraham Lincoln?

You need a brush up on world history.

Answer 5

You acn read all about the former PM at: http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1953/churchill-bio.html

Answer 6

Pime Minister of UK

Answer 7

the prime minister of the uk during ww2.

Answer 8

you need to ask that ?
wow what do they teach in scools these days.

Answer 9

Winston Churchill, the son of Randolph Churchill, a Conservative politician, was born in Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, on 30th November, 1874. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was the daughter of Leonard Jerome, a New York businessman.
After being educated at Harrow he went to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. Churchill joined the Fourth Hussars in 1895 and saw action on the Indian north-west frontier and in the Sudan where he took part in the Battle of Omdurman (1898).

While in the army Churchill supplied military reports for the Daily Telegraph and wrote books such as The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) and The River War (1899).

After leaving the British Army in 1899, Churchill worked as a war correspondent for the Morning Post. While reporting the Boer War in South Africa he was taken prisoner by the Boers but made headline news when he escaped. On returning to England he wrote about his experiences in the book, London to Ladysmith (1900).

In the 1900 General Election Churchill was elected as the Conservative MP for Oldham. As a result of reading, Poverty, A Study of Town Life by Seebohm Rowntree he became a supporter of social reform. In 1904, unconvinced by his party leaders desire for change, Churchill decided to join the Liberal Party.

In the 1906 General Election Churchill won North West Manchester and immediately became a member of the new Liberal government as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. When Herbert Asquith replaced Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister in 1908 he promoted Churchill to his cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. While in this post he carried through important social legislation including the establishment of employment exchanges.

On 12th September 1908 Churchill married Clementine Ogilvy Spencer and the following year published a book on his political philosophy, Liberalism and the Social Problem (1909).

Following the 1910 General Election Churchill became Home Secretary. Churchill introduced several reforms to the prison system, including the provision of lecturers and concerts for prisoners and the setting up of special after-care associations to help convicts after they had served their sentence. However, Churchill was severely criticized for using troops to maintain order during a Welsh miners's strike.

Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911 where he helped modernize the navy. Churchill was one of the first people to grasp the military potential of aircraft and in 1912 he set up the Royal Naval Air Service. He also established an Air Department at the Admiralty so as to make full use of this new technology. Churchill was so enthusiastic about these new developments that he took flying lessons.

On the outbreak of war in 1914, Churchill joined the War Council. However, he was blamed for the failure at the Dardanelles Campaign in 1915 and was moved to the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Unhappy about not having any power to influence the Government's war policy, he rejoined the British Army and commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front.

When David Lloyd George replaced Herbert Asquith as Prime Minister, he brought Churchill back into the government as Minister of Munitions and for the final year of the war, Churchill was in charge of the production of tanks, aeroplanes, guns and shells.

Churchill also served under David Lloyd George as Minister of War and Air (1919-20) and Colonial Secretary (1921-22). Churchill created great controversy over his policies in Iraq. It was estimated that around 25,000 British and 80,000 Indian troops would be needed to control the country. However, he argued that if Britain relied on air power, you could cut these numbers to 4,000 (British) and 10,000 (Indian). The government was convinced by this argument and it was decided to send the recently formed Royal Air Force to Iraq.

An uprising of more than 100,000 armed tribesmen took place in 1920. Over the next few months the RAF dropped 97 tons of bombs killing 9,000 Iraqis. This failed to end the resistance and Arab and Kurdish uprisings continued to pose a threat to British rule. Churchill suggested that chemical weapons should be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment." He added "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes to spread a lively terror" in Iraq.

The divisions in the Liberal Party led to Churchill being defeated by E. D. Morel at Dundee in the 1922 General Election. Churchill now rejoined the Conservative Party and was successfully elected to represent Epping in the 1924 General Election.

Stanley Baldwin, the leader of the new Conservative administration, appointed Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1925 Churchill controversially returned Britain the the Gold Standard and the following year took a strong line against the General Strike. Churchill edited the Government's newspaper, the British Gazette, during the dispute where he argued that "either the country will break the General Strike, or the General Strike will break the country."

With the defeat of the Conservative government in 1929, Churchill lost office. When Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government in 1931 Churchill, who was now seen as a right-wing extremist, was not invited to join the Cabinet. He spent the next few years concentrating on his writing, including the publication of the History of the English Speaking Peoples.

After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained power in Germany in 1933, Churchill became a leading advocate of rearmament. He was also a staunch critic of Neville Chamberlain and the Conservative government's appeasement policy. In 1939 Churchill controversially argued that Britain and France should form of a military alliance with the Soviet Union.

On the outbreak of the Second World War Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty and on 4th April 1940 became chairman of the Military Coordinating Committee. Later that month the German Army invaded and occupied Norway. The loss of Norway was a considerable setback for Neville Chamberlain and his policies for dealing with Nazi Germany.

On 8th May the Labour Party demanded a debate on the Norwegian campaign and this turned into a vote of censure. At the end of the debate 30 Conservatives voted against Chamberlain and a further 60 abstained. Chamberlain now decided to resign and on 10th May, 1940, George VI appointed Churchill as prime minister. Later that day the German Army began its Western Offensive and invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Two days later German forces entered France.

Churchill formed a coalition government and placed leaders of the Labour Party such as Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, Stafford Cripps and Hugh Dalton in key positions. He also brought in another long-time opponent of Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, as his secretary of state for war. Later that year Eden replaced Lord Halifax as foreign secretary.

Churchill also developed a strong personal relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt and this led to the sharing and trading of war supplies. The Lend Lease agreement of March 1941 allowed Britain to order war goods from the United States on credit.

Although he provided strong leadership the war continued to go badly for Britain and after a series of military defeats Churchill had to face a motion of no confidence in Parliament. However, he maintained the support of most members of the House of Commons and won by 475 votes to 25.

Churchill continued to be criticized for meddling in military matters and tended to take too much notice of the views of his friends such as Frederick Lindemann rather than his military commanders. In April 1941 he made the serious mistake of trying to save Greece by weakening his forces fighting the Desert War.

One of the major contributions made by Churchill to eventual victory was his ability to inspire the British people to greater effort by making public broadcasts on significant occasions. A brilliant orator he was a tireless source of strength to people experiencing the sufferings of the Blitz.

After Pearl Harbor Churchill worked closely with Franklin D. Roosevelt to ensure victory over Germany and Japan. He was also a loyal ally of the Soviet Union after Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June, 1941.

Churchill held important meetings with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at Teheran (November, 1943) and Yalta (February, 1945). Although Churchill's relationship with Stalin was always difficult he managed to successfully develop a united strategy against the Axis powers.

Despite intense pressure from Stalin to open a second-front by landing Allied troops in France in 1943, Churchill continued to argue that this should not happen until the defeat of Nazi Germany was guaranteed. The D-Day landings did not take place until June, 1944 and this delay enabled the Red Army to capture territory from Germany in Eastern Europe.

In public Churchill accepted plans for social reform drawn up by William Beveridge in 1944. However, he was unable to convince the electorate that he was as committed to these measures as much as Clement Attlee and the Labour Party. In the 1945 General Election Churchill's attempts to compare a future Labour government with Nazi Germany backfired and Attlee won a landslide victory.

Churchill became leader of the opposition and when visiting the United States in March 1946, he made his famous Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri. He suffered the first of several strokes in August 1946 but this information was kept from the general public and he continued to lead the Conservative Party.

Churchill returned to power after the 1951 General Election. After the publication of his six volume, The Second World War, Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Churchill's health continued to deteriorate and in 1955 he reluctantly retired from politics. Winston Churchill died on 24th January, 1965.

Answer 10

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, PC (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was an English politician and author, best known as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. At various times a soldier, author and politician, Churchill is generally regarded as one of the most important leaders in modern British and world history. He won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Still held in great affection by the British people, Sir Winston Churchill was voted the Greatest-Ever Briton in the 2002 BBC poll the 100 Greatest Britons.

Churchill's legal surname was Spencer-Churchill (he was related to the Spencer family), but starting with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, his branch of the family used the name Churchill in his public life.

Contents [hide]
1 Early life
2 The Army
3 Parliament
4 Ministerial office
5 Return to power
6 Career between the wars
7 Role as wartime Prime Minister
8 After World War II
9 Second term
9.1 The Mau Mau Rebellion
9.2 Malayan Emergency
10 Honours
11 Family and Personal Life
12 Last days
13 Churchill as historian
14 Churchill's war cabinet, May 1940 – May 1945
14.1 Changes
15 Winston Churchill's caretaker cabinet, May – July 1945
16 Winston Churchill's third cabinet, October 1951 – April 1955
16.1 Changes
17 Notes and references
17.1 Other references
18 External links
18.1 Speeches



[edit]
Early life
Winston Churchill was a descendant of the first famous member of the Churchill family, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Winston's politician father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was the third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough; Winston's mother was Lady Randolph Churchill (née Jennie Jerome), daughter of American millionaire Leonard Jerome.

Winston Churchill was born in Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Oxfordshire; he was delivered unexpectedly when his mother went into labour during a carriage ride. A common myth is that he was born in the ladies room during a ball; this is untrue.

As was typical for upper-class boys at that time, he spent much of his childhood at boarding schools. He sat the entrance exam for Harrow School, but, famously, on confronting the Latin paper, carefully wrote the title, his name, and the number 1 followed by a dot, and could not think of anything else to write. He was accepted despite this, but placed in the bottom division where they were primarily taught English, at which he excelled. Today, this famous ancient public school offers an annual Churchill essay-prize on a subject chosen by the head of the English department.

He was rarely visited by his mother (then known as Lady Randolph), whom he virtually worshipped, despite his letters begging her to either come or let his father permit him to come home. In later years, after Winston reached adulthood, he and his mother became closer, developing a kinship more like a brother and a sister than son and mother, coupled by a strong friendship.

He followed his father's career keenly but had a distant relationship with him. Once, in 1886, he is reported to have proclaimed, "My daddy is Chancellor of the Exchequer and one day that's what I'm going to be." His desolate, lonely childhood stayed with him throughout his life. On the other hand, as a child he was very close to his nurse, Elizabeth Anne Everest (who would be known now as a nanny), and was deeply saddened when she died on 3 July 1895. He paid for her gravestone at the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium.

Churchill did badly at Harrow, regularly being punished for poor work and lack of effort. He had an independent, rebellious nature and he failed to achieve much academically, failing some of the same courses numerous times and refusing to study the classics (that is, Latin and Ancient Greek). Despite this, he showed great ability in other areas such as history, in which he was sometimes top of his class. The view of Churchill as a failure at school is one which he himself propagated. He did, however, become the school's fencing champion.

[edit]
The Army
Churchill attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Upon his graduation at age 20, Churchill joined the army as a Subaltern of the IV (Queen's Own) Hussars Cavalry regiment. This regiment was stationed in Bangalore, India. On arriving in India, Churchill dislocated his shoulder while reaching from his boat for a chain on the dock and being thrown against the quay. This shoulder gave him trouble in later years, occasionally dislocating from its socket.

In India the main occupation of Churchill's regiment was polo, a situation which did not appeal to the young man, hungry for more military action. He devoted his time to educating himself from books which he had sent out. The Bangalore Club, of which he was a member, has records (which they display to visitors) showing that Winston Churchill failed to pay dues of 13 rupees, due to 'financial penury', a debt they believe to be still outstanding (see [1]).

While stationed in India, he began to seek out wars. In 1895 he and Reggie Barnes obtained leave to travel to Cuba to observe the Spanish battles against Cuban guerrillas. Churchill also obtained a commission to write about the conflict from the Daily Graphic newspaper. To Churchill's delight he came under fire for the first time on his twenty-first birthday. On his way to Cuba he also made his first visit to the United States, being introduced to New York society by one of his mother's lovers, Bourke Cockran. In 1897 Churchill attempted to travel to the Greco-Turkish War but this conflict effectively ended before he could arrive. He therefore continued on to England on leave before hearing of the Pathan revolt on the North West Frontier and rushing back to India to participate in the campaign to put it down.

Churchill had previously obtained a promise from Sir Bindon Blood, the commander of this expedition, that if he were to command again Churchill could accompany him. He wasted no time in reminding Blood of his promise and was able to participate in the six-week campaign, also writing articles for the newspapers The Pioneer and The Daily Telegraph at £5 an article. By October 1897 Churchill was back in Britain and his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, on that campaign, was published in December.

While still officially stationed in India, and having obtained a long period of leave, Churchill attempted to get himself assigned to the army being put together and commanded by Lord Kitchener and intended to achieve the reconquest of the Sudan. Kitchener was opposed to having Churchill on the staff, feeling he should be back with his regiment in India, but Churchill pulled a great many strings to get his presence approved—even arranging for a telegram to Kitchener from the Prime Minister the Marquess of Salisbury. In the end, Churchill was able to obtain a posting to the 21st Lancers—a force whose composition was chosen by the War Office, not Kitchener. He also served as a war correspondent for the Morning Post, at a rate of £15 per column. While in the Sudan, Churchill participated in what has been described as the last meaningful British cavalry charge at the battle of Omdurman. By October 1898, he had returned to Britain and begun work on the two-volume The River War, published the following year.

In 1899 Churchill left the army and decided upon a parliamentary career. He stood as a Conservative candidate in Oldham constituency in a by-election of that year. He came in third (Oldham was at that time a two-seat borough), failing to be elected.

On 12 October 1899 the second Anglo-Boer war between the United Kingdom and Afrikaners broke out in South Africa. Churchill set off as a war correspondent for the Morning Post, receiving £250 a month for four months. Once in South Africa, he accepted a lift on a British Army Armoured Train under the command of Aylmer Haldane; this train was derailed by a Boer ambush and explosion. Churchill, though not officially a combatant, took charge of operations to get the track cleared and managed to ensure that the engine and half the train, carrying the wounded, could escape. Churchill, however, was not so lucky and, together with other officers and soldiers, was captured and held in a POW camp in Pretoria, despite uncertainty about his combatant status. Churchill would claim, in My Early Life, published in 1930, that he had been captured by General Louis Botha, subsequently prime minister of the then Union of South Africa, but this claim has been challenged, notably by Churchill's grand-daughter Celia Sandys in her book Churchill Wanted Dead or Alive.

Churchill managed to escape from his prison camp, resulting in a long-running criticism and controversy as it was claimed that he did not wait for Haldane and another man who had planned the escape, but who were unable, or unwilling, to risk slipping over the fence when Churchill did. Once outside the Pretoria prison camp, Churchill travelled almost 300 miles (480 km) to Portuguese Lourenço Marques in Delagoa Bay, with the assistance of an English mine manager who hid him down his mine and smuggled him onto a train headed out of Boer territory. His escape made him a minor national hero for a time in Britain, though instead of returning home he took ship to Durban and rejoined General Redvers Buller's army on its march to relieve Ladysmith and take Pretoria. This time, although continuing as a war correspondent, Churchill gained a commission in the South African Light Horse Regiment. He fought at Spion Kop and was one of the first British troops into Ladysmith and Pretoria; in fact, he and the Duke of Marlborough, his cousin, were able to get ahead of the rest of the troops in Pretoria, where they demanded and received the surrender of 52 Boer guards of the prison camp there.

Churchill's two books on the Boer war, London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton's March, were published in May and October 1900 respectively.

[edit]
Parliament
After returning from South Africa, Churchill again stood as a Conservative party candidate in Oldham, this time in the 1900 general election, or Khaki election.

He was duly elected, but rather than attending the opening of Parliament, he embarked on a speaking tour throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, by means of which he raised ten thousand pounds for himself. (Members of Parliament were unpaid in those days and Churchill was not rich by the standards of the time.) While in the United States, one of his speeches was introduced by Mark Twain. He dined with Theodore Roosevelt, however, they did not take to each other.

In February 1901, Churchill arrived back in Britain to enter Parliament, and became associated with a group of Tory dissidents led by Lord Hugh Cecil and referred to as the Hughligans, a play on "Hooligans". During his first parliamentary session, Churchill provoked controversy by opposing the government's army estimates, arguing against extravagant military expenditure. By 1903, he was drawing away from Lord Hugh's views. He also opposed the Liberal Unionist leader Joseph Chamberlain, whose party was in coalition with the Conservatives. Chamberlain proposed extensive tariff reforms intended to protect the economic pre-eminence of Britain behind tariff barriers. This earned him the detestation of his own supporters — indeed, Conservative backbenchers staged a walkout once while he was speaking. His own constituency effectively deselected him, although he continued to sit for Oldham until the next general election.

In 1904, Churchill's dissatisfaction with the Conservatives and the appeal of the Liberals had grown so strong that, on returning from the Whitsun recess, he crossed the floor to sit as a member of the Liberal Party. As a Liberal, he continued to campaign for free trade. He won the seat of Manchester North West (carefully selected for him) in the 1906 general election.


Churchill as a young manFrom 1903 until 1905 Churchill was also engaged in writing Lord Randolph Churchill, a two-volume biography of his father which came out in 1906 and was received as a masterpiece. However, filial devotion caused him to soften some of his father's less attractive aspects.[citation needed]




[edit]
Ministerial office
When the Liberals took office, with Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister, in December 1905 Churchill became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. Serving under the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Victor Bruce, 9th Earl of Elgin, Churchill dealt with the adoption of constitutions for the defeated Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and with the issue of 'Chinese slavery' in South African mines. He also became a prominent spokesman on free trade. Churchill soon became the most prominent member of the Government outside the Cabinet, and when Campbell-Bannerman was succeeded by Herbert Henry Asquith in 1908, it came as little surprise when Churchill was promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade. Under the law at the time, a newly appointed Cabinet Minister was obliged to seek re-election at a by-election. Churchill lost his Manchester seat to the Conservative William Joynson-Hicks but was soon elected in another by-election at Dundee constituency. As President of the Board of Trade he pursued radical social reforms in conjunction with David Lloyd George, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer.

In 1910 Churchill was promoted to Home Secretary, where he was to prove somewhat controversial. A famous photograph from the time shows the impetuous Churchill taking personal charge of the January 1911 Sidney Street Siege, peering around a corner to view a gun battle between cornered anarchists and Scots Guards. His role attracted much criticism. The building under siege caught fire. Churchill denied the fire brigade access, forcing the criminals to choose surrender or death. Arthur Balfour asked, "He [Churchill] and a photographer were both risking valuable lives. I understand what the photographer was doing but what was the Right Honourable gentleman doing?"

1910 also saw Churchill preventing the army being used to deal with a dispute at the Cambrian Colliery mine in Tonypandy. Initially Churchill blocked the use of troops fearing a repeat of the 1887 'bloody sunday' in Trafalgar Square. Nevertheless troops were deployed to protect the mines and to avoid riots when thirteen strikers were tried for minor offences, an action that broke the tradition of not involving the military in civil affairs and led to lingering dislike for Churchill in Wales.

In 1911, Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty, a post he would hold into the First World War. He gave impetus to military reform efforts, including development of naval aviation, tanks, and the switch in fuel from coal to oil, a massive engineering task, also reliant on securing Mesopotamia's oil rights, bought circa 1907 through the secret service using the Royal Burmah Oil Company as a front company.

The development of the battle tank was financed from naval research funds via the Landships Committee, and, although a decade later development of the battle tank would be seen as a stroke of genius, at the time it was seen as misappropriation of funds. The tank was deployed too early and in too few numbers, much to Churchill's annoyance. He wanted a fleet of tanks used to surprise the Germans under cover of smoke, and to open a large section of the trenches by crushing barbed wire and creating a breakthrough sector.

In 1915 Churchill was one of the political and military engineers of the disastrous Gallipoli landings on the Dardanelles during World War I. Churchill took much of the blame for the fiasco, and when Prime Minister Asquith formed an all-party coalition government, the Conservatives demanded Churchill's demotion as the price for entry. For several months Churchill served in the sinecure of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, before resigning from the government feeling his energies were not being used. He rejoined the army, though remaining an MP, and served for several months on the Western Front. During this period his second in command was a young Archibald Sinclair who would later lead the Liberal Party.

[edit]
Return to power
In December 1916, Asquith resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by Lloyd George. The time was thought not yet right to risk the Conservatives' wrath by bringing Churchill back into government. However, in July 1917 Churchill was appointed Minister of Munitions. He was the main architect of the Ten Year Rule, but the major preoccupation of his tenure in the War Office was the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. Churchill was a staunch advocate of foreign intervention, declaring that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle". He secured from a divided and loosely organised Cabinet intensification and prolongation of the British involvement beyond the wishes of any major group in Parliament or the nation — and in the face of the bitter hostility of Labour. In 1920, after the last British forces had been withdrawn, Churchill was instrumental in having arms sent to the Poles when they invaded Ukraine. He became Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1921 and was a signatory of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State.

[edit]
Career between the wars
In October 1922, Churchill underwent an operation to remove his appendix. Upon his return, he learned that the government had fallen and a General Election was looming. The Liberal Party was now beset by internal division and Churchill's campaign was weak. He lost his seat at Dundee to prohibitionist, Edwin Scrymgeour, quipping that he had lost his ministerial office, his seat and his appendix all at once. Churchill stood for the Liberals again in the 1923 general election, losing in Leicester, but over the next few months he moved towards the Conservative Party, though initially using the labels "Anti-Socialist" and "Constitutionalist". Less than one year later, in the General Election of 1924, he was elected to represent Epping as a "Constitutionalist" with Conservative backing (a statue in his honour in Woodford Green was erected when Woodford Green was part of the Epping constituency). The following year he formally rejoined the Conservative Party, commenting wryly that "Anyone can rat [change parties], but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat."

He was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924 under Stanley Baldwin and oversaw the United Kingdom's disastrous return to the Gold Standard, which resulted in deflation, unemployment, and the miners' strike that led to the General Strike of 1926. This decision prompted the economist John Maynard Keynes to write The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, correctly arguing that the return to the gold standard would lead to a world depression. Churchill later regarded this as one of the worst decisions of his life. To be fair, it must be noted that he was not an economist and that he acted on the advice of the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman.

During the General Strike of 1926, Churchill was reported to have suggested that machine guns be used on the striking miners. Churchill edited the Government's newspaper, the British Gazette, and during the dispute he argued that "either the country will break the General Strike, or the General Strike will break the country." Furthermore, he controversially claimed that the Fascism of Benito Mussolini had "rendered a service to the whole world," showing, as it had, "a way to combat subversive forces" — that is, he considered the regime to be a bulwark against the perceived threat of Communist revolution. At one point, Churchill went as far as to call Mussolini the "Roman genius ... the greatest lawgiver among men." [1]

The Conservative government was defeated in the 1929 General Election. In the next two years, Churchill became estranged from the Conservative leadership over the issues of protective tariffs and Indian Home Rule, which he bitterly opposed. He denigrated the father of the Indian independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi, as "a half-naked fakir" who "ought to be laid, bound hand and foot, at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated on its back". When Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government in 1931, Churchill was not invited to join the Cabinet. He was now at the lowest point in his career, in a period known as "the wilderness years". He spent much of the next few years concentrating on his writing, including Marlborough: His Life and Times — a biography of his ancestor John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough — and A History of the English Speaking Peoples (which was not published until well after WWII). He became most notable for his outspoken opposition towards the granting of independence to India (see Simon Commission and Government of India Act 1935).

Soon, though, his attention was drawn to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the dangers of Germany's rearmament. For a time he was a lone voice calling on Britain to strengthen itself to counter the belligerence of Germany. [2] Churchill was a fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, leading the wing of the Conservative Party that opposed the Munich Agreement which Chamberlain famously declared to mean "peace in our time". [3] He was also an outspoken supporter of King Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis, leading to some speculation that he might be appointed Prime Minister if the King refused to take Baldwin's advice and consequently the government resigned. However, this did not happen, and Churchill found himself politically isolated and bruised for some time after this.

[edit]
Role as wartime Prime Minister

Yousuf Karsh portrait of Winston Churchill on cover of Life magazine.At the outbreak of the Second World War Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, just as he was in the first part of the First World War. According to myth, the Navy sent out: "Winston's back!"

In this job he proved to be one of the highest-profile ministers during the so-called "Phony War", when the only noticeable action was at sea. Churchill advocated the pre-emptive occupation of the neutral Norwegian iron-ore port of Narvik and the iron mines in Kiruna, Sweden, early in the War. However, Chamberlain and the rest of the War Cabinet disagreed, and the operation was delayed until the German invasion of Norway, which was successful despite British efforts.

On 10 May 1940, hours before the German invasion of France by a surprising lightning advance through the Low Countries, it became clear that, following failure in Norway and general incompetence, the country had no confidence in Chamberlain's prosecution of the war and so Chamberlain resigned. The commonly accepted version of events states that Lord Halifax turned down the post of Prime Minister because he believed he could not govern effectively as a member of the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons. Although traditionally the Prime Minister does not advise the King on the former's successor, Chamberlain wanted someone who would command the support of all three major parties in the House of Commons. A meeting with the other two party leaders led to the recommendation of Churchill, and as a constitutional monarch, George VI asked Churchill to be Prime Minister and to form an all-party government. Churchill, breaking with tradition, did not send Chamberlain a message expressing regret over his resignation. [4]

Churchill's greatest achievement was that he refused to capitulate when defeat by Germany was a strong possibility and he remained a strong opponent of any negotiations with Germany. Few others in the Cabinet had this degree of resolve. By adopting this policy Churchill maintained the United Kingdom as a base from which the Allies would eventually attack Germany, thereby ensuring that the Soviet sphere of influence did not also extend over Western Europe at the end of the war.

In response to previous criticisms that there had been no clear single minister in charge of the prosecution of the war, Churchill created and took the additional position of Minister of Defence. He immediately put his friend and confidant, the industrialist and newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, in charge of aircraft production. It was Beaverbrook's astounding business acumen that allowed Britain to quickly gear up aircraft production and engineering that eventually made the difference in the war.

Churchill's speeches were a great inspiration to the embattled United Kingdom. His first speech as Prime Minister was the famous "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat" speech. He followed that closely with two other equally famous ones, given just before the Battle of Britain. One included the immortal line, "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." The other included the equally famous "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 still say, 'This was their finest hour.' " At the height of the Battle of Britain, his bracing survey of the situation included the memorable line "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few", which engendered the enduring nickname "The Few" for the Allied fighter pilots who won it. One of his most memorable war speeches came on November 10th 1942 at the Lord Mayor's Luncheon at Mansion House in London. That day, word had come that American and British troops had surrounded the port of Casablanca in Africa. As most people were saying it was the beginning of the end, Churchill famously said

"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning"


Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Churchill at the Cairo Conference in 1943His good relationship with Franklin D. Roosevelt secured the United Kingdom vital supplies via the North Atlantic Ocean shipping routes. It was for this reason that Churchill was relieved when Roosevelt was re-elected. Upon re-election, Roosevelt immediately set about implementing a new method of not only providing military hardware to Britain without the need for monetary payment, but also of providing, free of fiscal charge, much of the shipping that transported the supplies. Put simply, Roosevelt persuaded Congress that repayment for this immensely costly service would take the form of defending the USA; and so Lend-lease was born. Churchill had 12 strategic conferences with Roosevelt which covered the Atlantic Charter, Europe first strategy, the Declaration by the United Nations and other war policies. Churchill initiated the Special Operations Executive (SOE) under Hugh Dalton's Ministry of Economic Warfare, which established, conducted and fostered covert, subversive and partisan operations in occupied territories with notable success; and also the Commandos which established the pattern for most of the world's current Special Forces. The Russians referred to him as the "British Bulldog".

Churchill's health suffered, as shown by a mild heart attack he suffered in December 1941 at the White House and also in December 1943 when he contracted pneumonia.

Churchill supported the bombing of Dresden shortly before the end of the war; many including Churchill, who wrote about it on 28th March 1945, have since maintained that the city was primarily a civilian target with little military value[citation needed]. However, the bombing was seen at the time as being helpful to the Soviet allies, and the perspective of the British who had lived through the Blitz on London has to be taken into account (who considered that the destruction of cities was both just retribution for German attacks on British cities, and also a lesson to Germany never to go to war again).

Churchill was party to treaties that would redraw post-WWII European and Asian boundaries. These were discussed as early as 1943. Proposals for European boundaries and settlements were officially agreed to by Harry S. Truman, Churchill, and Stalin at Potsdam. At the second Quebec Conference in 1944 he drafted and together with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a toned down version of the original Morgenthau Plan, where they pledged to convert Germany after its unconditional surrender "into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character."[5]

The settlement concerning the borders of Poland, i.e. the boundary between Poland and the Soviet Union and between Germany and Poland, was viewed as a betrayal in Poland during the post-war years, as it was established against the views of the Polish government in exile. Churchill was convinced that the only way to alleviate tensions between the two populations was the transfer of people, to match the national borders. As he expounded in the House of Commons in 1944, "Expulsion is the method which, insofar as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble... A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions." However the resulting expulsions of Germans was carried out by the Soviet Union in a way which resulted in much hardship and, according to amongst others a 1966 report by the West German Ministry of Refugees and Displaced Persons, the death of over 2,100,000. Churchill opposed the effective annexation of Poland by the Soviet Union and wrote bitterly about it in his books, but he was unable to prevent it at the conferences.

On 9 October 1944, he and Eden were in Moscow, and that night they met Stalin in the Kremlin, without the Americans. Bargaining went on throughout the night. Churchill wrote on a scrap of paper that Stalin had a 90 percent "interest" in Romania, Britain a 90 percent "interest" in Greece, both Russia and Britain a 50 percent interest in Yugoslavia. When they got to Italy, Stalin ceded that country to Churchill. The crucial questions arose when the Ministers of Foreign Affairs discussed "percentages" in Eastern Europe. Molotov's proposals were that Russia should have a 75 percent interest in Hungary, 75 percent in Bulgaria, and 60 percent in Yugoslavia. This was Stalin's price for ceding Italy and Greece. Eden tried to haggle: Hungary 75/25, Bulgaria 80/20, but Yugoslavia 50/50. After lengthy bargaining they settled on an 80/20 division of interest between Russia and Britain in Bulgaria and Hungary, and a 50/50 division in Yugoslavia. U.S. Ambassador Harriman was informed only after the bargain was struck. This gentleman's agreement was sealed with a handshake.

[edit]
After World War II
Although the importance of Churchill's role in World War II was undeniable, he had many enemies in his own country. His expressed contempt for a number of popular ideas, in particular public health care and better education for the majority of the population, produced much dissatisfaction amongst the population, particularly those who had fought in the war. Immediately following the close of the war in Europe, Churchill was heavily defeated in the 1945 election by Clement Attlee and the Labour Party. [6] Some historians think that many British voters believed that the man who had led the nation so well in war was not the best man to lead it in peace. Others see the election result as a reaction not against Churchill personally, but against the Conservative Party's record in the 1930s under Baldwin and Chamberlain.

Winston Churchill was an early supporter of the pan-Europeanism that eventually led to the formation of the European Common Market and later the European Union (for which one of the three main buildings of the European Parliament is named in his honour). Churchill was also instrumental in giving France a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (which provided another European power to counterbalance the Soviet Union's permanent seat). Churchill also occasionally made comments supportive of world government. For instance, he once said (see[[2]]):

Unless some effective world supergovernment for the purpose of preventing war can be set up… the prospects for peace and human progress are dark… If… it is found possible to build a world organization of irresistible force and inviolable authority for the purpose of securing peace, there are no limits to the blessings which all men enjoy and share.
At the beginning of the Cold War, he famously popularised the term: the "Iron Curtain", which had been used before by Nazi leaders Hitler and Goebbels. The term entered the public consciousness after a 1946 speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, when Churchill, a guest of Harry S Truman, famously declared:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.
[edit]
Second term
Churchill was restless and bored as leader of the Conservative opposition in the immediate post-war years. After Labour's defeat in the General Election of 1951, Churchill again became Prime Minister. His third government — after the wartime national government and the brief caretaker government of 1945 — would last until his resignation in 1955. During this period he renewed what he called the "special relationship" between Britain and the United States, and engaged himself in the formation of the post-war order.

His domestic priorities were, however, overshadowed by a series of foreign policy crises, which were partly the result of the continued decline of British military and imperial prestige and power. Being a strong proponent of Britain as an international power, Churchill would often meet such moments with direct action.

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The Mau Mau Rebellion
Main article: Mau Mau Uprising
In 1951, grievances against the colonial distribution of land came to a head with the Kenya Africa Union demanding greater representation and land reform. When these demands were rejected, more radical elements came forward, launching the Mau Mau rebellion in 1952. On 17 August 1952, a state of emergency was declared, and British troops were flown to Kenya to deal with the rebellion. As both sides increased the ferocity of their attacks, the country moved to full-scale civil war.

In 1953, the Lari massacre, perpetrated by Mau-Mau insurgents against Kikuyu loyal to the British, changed the political complexion of the rebellion and gave the public-relations advantage to the British. Churchill's strategy was to use a military stick combined with implementing many of the concessions that Attlee's government had blocked in 1951. He ordered an increased military presence and appointed General Sir George Erskine, who would implement Operation Anvil in 1954 that broke the back of the rebellion in the city of Nairobi. Operation Hammer, in turn, was designed to root out rebels in the countryside. Churchill ordered peace talks opened, but these collapsed shortly after his leaving office.

[edit]
Malayan Emergency
Main article: Malayan Emergency
In Malaya, a rebellion against British rule had been in progress since 1948. Once again, Churchill's government inherited a crisis, and once again Churchill chose to use direct military action against those in rebellion while attempting to build an alliance with those who were not. He stepped up the implementation of a "hearts and minds" campaign and approved the creation of fortified villages, a tactic that would become a recurring part of Western military strategy in Southeast Asia. (See Vietnam War).

The Malayan Emergency was a more direct case of a guerrilla movement, centred in an ethnic group, but backed by the Soviet Union. As such, Britain's policy of direct confrontation and military victory had a great deal more support than in Iran or in Kenya. At the highpoint of the conflict, over 35,500 British troops were stationed in Malaya. As the rebellion lost ground, it began to lose favour with the local population.

While the rebellion was slowly being defeated, it was equally clear that colonial rule from Britain was no longer plausible. In 1953, plans were drawn up for independence for Singapore and the other crown colonies in the region. The first elections were held in 1955, just days before Churchill's own resignation, and in 1957, under Prime Minister Anthony Eden, Malaya became independent.

[edit]
Honours
From 1941 to his death, he was the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a ceremonial office. In 1941 Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King swore him into the Queen's Privy Council for Canada. Although this allowed him to use the honorific title "The Honourable" and the post-nominal letters "P.C." both of these were trumped by his membership in the Imperial Privy Council which allowed him the use of The Right Honourable.

In 1953 he was awarded two major honours: he was invested as a Knight of the Garter (becoming Sir Winston Churchill, KG) and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values".

A stroke in June of that year led to him being paralysed down his left side. He retired as Prime Minister on 5 April 1955 because of his health but retained his post as Chancellor of the University of Bristol, and remained a member of parliament until 1964. In 1959 he became Father of the House, the MP with the longest continuous service.

In 1955, after retiring as Prime Minister, Churchill was offered elevation to the peerage in the rank of duke. He considered the offer, and even chose the name "Duke of London". However, he then declined the title after being persuaded by his son Randolph not to accept it. Since then, only British royals have been made dukes.

In 1956 Churchill received the Karlspreis (known in English as the Charlemagne Award), an award by the German city of Aachen to those who most contribute to the European idea and European peace.

In 1960, Churchill College, Cambridge was established as the national and Commonwealth memorial to Churchill.

In 1963, he became the first person to become an Honorary Citizen of the United States.

Churchill is the tenth most admired person in the 20th century, according to Gallup.

Four schools in Canada, one in Vancouver, one in Hamilton, one in St. Catharines and one in Calgary were named in his honour. Churchill Auditorium at the Technion is named after him.

[edit]
Family and Personal Life

A young Winston Churchill and fiancée Clementine Hozier shortly before their marriage in 1908.On 12 September 1908 at the socially desirable St. Margaret's, Westminster, Churchill married Clementine Hozier, a dazzling but largely penniless beauty whom he met at a dinner party that March (he had proposed to actress Ethel Barrymore but was turned down). They had five children: Diana; Randolph; Sarah, who co-starred with Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding; Marigold (1918 - 1921), who died in early childhood; and Mary, who has written a book about her parents. Churchill's son Randolph and his grandsons Nicholas Soames and Winston all followed him into Parliament. The daughters tended to marry politicians and support their careers. Some of the siblings wrote serious books.

Clementine's mother was Lady Blanche Henrietta Ogilvy, second wife of Sir Henry Montague Hozier and a daughter of the 7th Earl of Airlie. Clementine's paternity, however, is open to debate. Lady Blanche was well known for sharing her favours and was eventually divorced as a result. She maintained that Clementine's father was Capt. William George "Bay" Middleton, a noted horseman. But Clementine's biographer Joan Hardwick has surmised, due to Sir Henry Hozier's reputed sterility, that all Lady Blanche's "Hozier" children were actually fathered by her sister's husband, Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, better known as a grandfather of the infamous Mitford sisters of the 1920s.

When not in London on government business, Churchill usually lived at his beloved Chartwell House in Kent, two miles south of Westerham. He and his wife bought the house in 1922 and lived there until his death in 1965. During his Chartwell stays, he enjoyed writing as well as painting, bricklaying, and admiring the estate's famous black swans.

Like many politicians of his age, Churchill was also a member of several English gentlemen's clubs - the Reform Club and the National Liberal Club whilst he was a Liberal MP, and later the Athenaeum, Boodle's, and the Carlton Club when he was a Conservative. Despite his multiple memberships, Churchill was not a habitual clubman; he spent relatively little time in each of these, and preferred to conduct any lunchtime or dinner meetings at the Savoy Grill or the Ritz, or else in the Members' Dining Room of the House of Commons when meeting other MPs.

For much of his life, Churchill battled with depression, which he called his black dog.

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Last days

Arms of Winston ChurchillAware that he was slowing down both physically and mentally, Churchill retired as Prime Minister in 1955 and was succeeded by Anthony Eden, who had long been his ambitious protégé. (Three years earlier, Eden had married Churchill's niece, Anne Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, his second marriage.) Churchill spent most of his retirement at Chartwell House in Kent, two miles south of Westerham.

In 1963 U.S. President John F. Kennedy named Churchill the first Honorary Citizen of the United States. Churchill was too ill to attend the White House ceremony, so his son and grandson accepted the award for him.

On 15 January 1965, Churchill suffered another stroke — a severe cerebral thrombosis — that left him gravely ill. He died nine days later, aged 90, on 24 January 1965, 70 years to the day after his father's death.

By decree of the Queen, his body lay in State in Westminster Hall for three days and a state funeral service was held at St Paul's Cathedral. [7] This was the first state funeral for a non-royal family member since 1914.

As his coffin passed down the Thames on the Havengore, the cranes of London's docklands bowed in salute. The Royal Artillery fired a 19-gun salute (as head of government), and the RAF staged a fly-by of sixteen English Electric Lightning fighters. The state funeral was the largest gathering of dignitaries in Britain as representatives from over 100 countries attended, including French President Charles de Gaulle, Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson, Prime Minister of Rhodesia Ian Smith, other heads of state and government, and members of royalty. It also saw the largest assemblage of statesmen in the world until the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005.

It has been suggested it was Churchill's wish that, were de Gaulle to outlive him, his (Churchill's) funeral procession should pass through Waterloo Station. This is complete myth. Though President de Gaulle did attend the service and the coffin departed for Bladon from Waterloo Station, there is absolutely no connection. In fact, Churchill did not plan his own funeral as commonly believed; he made a few suggestions, but there was a private committee which made the plans, and he was not on it.

At Churchill's request, he was buried in the family plot at St Martin Church, Bladon, near Woodstock, not far from his birthplace at Blenheim.

Because the funeral took place on 30 January, people in the United States marked it by paying tribute to his friendship with Roosevelt because it was the anniversary of FDR's birth. The tributes were led by Roosevelt's children.

On 9 February 1965, Churchill's estate was probated at 304,044 pounds sterling (equivalent to about £3.8m in 2004).

One of four specially made sets of false teeth, designed to retain Churchill's distinctive style of speech, which Churchill wore throughout his life is now kept in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

[edit]
Churchill as historian

Statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, opposite the Palace of Westminster in central London. Another cast of the same statue is found in Oslo, Norway, Canberra, Australia at the Australian National University, and a similar in Halifax, Nova Scotia and Toronto, Ontario Canada.Churchill was a prolific writer throughout his life and, during his periods out of office, attained recognition as a professional writer who was also a Member of Parliament. Despite his aristocratic birth, he inherited little money (his mother spent most of his inheritance) and always needed ready cash to maintain his lavish lifestyle and to compensate for a number of failed investments. Some of his historical works, such as A History of the English Speaking Peoples, were written primarily to raise money.

Although Churchill was an excellent writer, he was not trained as a historian. In his youth he was an avid reader of history but within a narrow range. The major influences on his historical thought, and his prose style, were Clarendon's history of the English Civil War, Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Macaulay's History of England. He had little interest in social or economic history; he saw history as essentially political and military, driven by great men rather than by economic forces or social change.

Churchill was convinced that the British people had a unique greatness and an imperial destiny, and that all British history should be seen as progress towards fulfilling that destiny. This belief inspired his political career as well as his historical writing. It was criticized as an old-fashioned view of history even in Churchill's youth, but he never modified it or showed any interest in other schools of history. Although he employed professional historians as assistants, they had no influence over the content of his works.

Churchill's historical writings fall into three categories. The first is works of family history, the biographies of his father, Life of Lord Randolph Churchill (1906), and of his great ancestor, Marlborough: His Life and Times (four volumes, 1933–38). These are still regarded as fine biographies, but are marred by Churchill's desire to present his subjects in the best possible light. He made only limited use of the available source materials and, in the case of his father, suppressed some material from family archives that reflected badly on Lord Randolph. The Marlborough biography shows to the full Churchill's great talent for military history. Both books have been superseded by more scholarly works but are still highly readable.

The second category is Churchill's autobiographical works, including his early journalistic compilations The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), The River War (1899), London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (1900) and Ian Hamilton's March (1900). These latter two were issued in a re-edited form as My Early Life (1930). All these books are colourful and entertaining, and contain some valuable information about Britain's imperial wars in India, Sudan and South Africa, but they are essentially exercises in self-promotion, since Churchill was already a Parliamentary candidate in 1900.

Churchill's reputation as a writer, however, rests on the third category, his three massive multi-volume works of narrative history. These are his histories of the First World War — The World Crisis (six volumes, 1923–31) — and of The Second World War (six volumes, 1948–53), and his History of the English-Speaking Peoples (four volumes, 1956–58, much of which had been written in the 1930s). These are among the longest works of history ever published (The Second World War runs to more than two million words), and earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Churchill's histories of the two world wars are, of course, far from being conventional historical works, since the author was a central participant in both stories and took full advantage of that fact in writing his books. Both are in a sense, therefore, memoirs as well as histories, but Churchill was careful to broaden their scope to include events in which he played no part — the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, for example. Inevitably, however, Churchill placed Britain, and therefore himself, at the centre of his narrative. Arthur Balfour described The World Crisis as "Winston's brilliant autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe."

As a Cabinet minister for part of the First World War and as Prime Minister for nearly all of the Second, Churchill had unique access to official documents, military plans, official secrets and correspondence between world leaders. After the First War, when there were few rules governing these documents, Churchill simply took many of them with him when he left office and used them freely in his books — as did other wartime politicians such as David Lloyd George. As a result of this, strict rules were put in place preventing Cabinet ministers using official documents for writing history or memoirs once they left office.

The World Crisis was inspired by Lord Esher's attack on Churchill's reputation in his memoirs. It soon broadened out into a general multi-volume history. The volumes are a mix of military history, written with Churchill's usual narrative flair; diplomatic and political history, often written to justify Churchill's own actions and policies during the war; portraits of other political and military figures, sometimes written to further political vendettas or settle debts (most notably with Lloyd George); and personal memoir, written in a colourful but highly selective manner. Today these books are not in favour as historical references. As with all Churchill's works, they have little to say about economic or social history, and are coloured by his political views — particularly in regard to the Russian Revolution. But they remain highly readable for their narrative skill and vivid portrayals of people and events.

When he resumed office in 1939, Churchill fully intended writing a history of the war then beginning. He said several times: "I will leave judgements on this matter to history — but I will be one of the historians." To circumvent the rules against the use of official documents, he took the precaution throughout the war of having a weekly summary of correspondence, minutes, memoranda and other documents printed in galleys and headed "Prime Minister's personal minutes". These were then stored at his home for future use. As well, Churchill wrote or dictated a number of letters and memorandums with the specific intention of placing his views on the record for later use as a historian.

This all became a source of great controversy when The Second World War began appearing in 1948. Churchill was not an academic historian, he was a politician, and was in fact Leader of the Opposition, still intending to return to office. By what right, it was asked, did he have access to Cabinet, military and diplomatic records which were denied to other historians?

What was unknown at the time was the fact that Churchill had done a deal with the Attlee Labour government which came to office in 1945. Recognising Churchill's enormous prestige, Attlee agreed to allow him (or rather his research assistants) free access to most documents, provided that (a) no official secrets were revealed, (b) the documents were not used for party political purposes, and (c) the typescript was vetted by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook. Brook took a close interest in the books and rewrote some sections himself to ensure that nothing was said which might harm British interests or embarrass the government. Churchill's history thus became a semi-official one.

Churchill's privileged access to documents and his unrivalled personal knowledge gave him an advantage over all other historians of the Second World War for many years. The books had enormous sales in both Britain and the United States and made Churchill a rich man for the first time. It was not until after his death and the opening of the archives that some of the deficiencies of his work became apparent.

Some of these were inherent in the unique position Churchill occupied as a historian, being both a former Prime Minister and a serving politician. He could not reveal military secrets, such as the work of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park (see Ultra) or the planning of the atomic bomb. He could not discuss wartime disputes with figures such as Dwight Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle or Tito, since they were still world leaders at the time he was writing. He could not discuss Cabinet disputes with Labour leaders such as Attlee, whose goodwill the project depended on. He could not reflect on the deficiencies of generals such as Archibald Wavell or Claude Auchinleck for fear they might sue him (some, indeed, threatened to do so).

Other deficiencies were of Churchill's own making. Although he described the fighting on the Eastern Front, he had little real interest in it and no access to Soviet or German documents, so his account is a pastiche of secondary sources, largely written by his assistants. The same is true to some extent of the war in the Pacific except for episodes such as the fall of Singapore in which he was involved. His account of the U.S. naval war in the Pacific was so heavily based on other writers that he was accused of plagiarism.

The real focus of Churchill's work is always on the war in Western Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa, but here his work is based heavily on his own documents, so it greatly exaggerates his own role. He had little access to American documents, and even those he did have, such as his letters from Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, had to be used with caution for diplomatic reasons. Although he was, of course, a central figure in the war, he was not as central as his books suggest. Although he is usually fair, some personal vendettas are aired — against Stafford Cripps, for example.

The Second World War can still be read with great profit by students of the period, provided it is seen mainly as a memoir by a leading participant rather than as an authoritative history by a detached historian. The war, and particularly the period between 1940 and 1942 when Britain was fighting alone, was the climax of Churchill's career, and his personal account of the inside story of those days is unique and invaluable. But, since the archives have been opened, far more accurate and reliable histories have emerged.

Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples was commissioned and largely written in the 1930s when Churchill badly needed money, but it was put aside when war broke out in 1939, being finally issued after he left office for the last time in 1955. Although it contains much fine writing, it shows Churchill's deficiencies as a historian at their most glaring. It is generally regarded as tendentious and very old-fashioned, seeing world history as a one-dimensional pageant of battles and speeches, kings and statesmen, in which the English occupy central stage. Events viewed by today's historians as being of central importance, such as the industrial revolution, are scarcely mentioned. Although Churchill's enormous prestige ensured that the books were respectfully received and sold well, they are little read today.

[edit]
Churchill's war cabinet, May 1940 – May 1945
Winston Churchill — Prime Minister, Minister of Defence and Leader of the House of Commons.
Neville Chamberlain — Lord President of the Council
Clement Attlee — Lord Privy Seal and effective Deputy Leader of the House of Commons.
Lord Halifax — Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
Arthur Greenwood — Minister without Portfolio
[edit]
Changes
August 1940: Lord Beaverbrook (a Canadian-British citizen), Minister of Aircraft Production, joins the War Cabinet
October 1940: Sir John Anderson succeeds Neville Chamberlain as Lord President. Sir Kingsley Wood, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, enter the War Cabinet. Lord Halifax assumes the additional job of Leader of the House of Lords.
December 1940: Anthony Eden succeeds Lord Halifax as Foreign Secretary. Halifax remains nominally in the Cabinet as Ambassador to the United States. His successor as Leader of the House of Lords is not in the War Cabinet.
May 1941: Lord Beaverbrook ceased to be Minister of Aircraft Production, but remains in the Cabinet as Minister of State. His successor was not in the War Cabinet.
June 1941: Lord Beaverbrook becomes Minister of Supply, remaining in the War Cabinet.
1941: Oliver Lyttelton enters the Cabinet as Minister Resident in the Middle East.
4 February 1942: Lord Beaverbrook becomes Minister of War Production, his successor as Minister of Supply is not in the War Cabinet.
19 February 1942: Beaverbrook resigns and no replacement Minister of War Production is appointed for the moment. Clement Attlee becomes Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister. Sir Stafford Cripps succeeds Attlee as Lord Privy Seal and takes over the position of Leader of the House of Commons from Churchill. Sir Kingsley Wood leaves the War Cabinet, though remaining Chancellor of the Exchequer.
22 February 1942: Arthur Greenwood resigns from the War Cabinet.
March 1942: Oliver Lyttelton fills the vacant position of Minister of Production ("War" was dropped from the title). Richard Gardiner Casey (a member of the Australian Parliament) succeeds Oliver Lyttelton as Minister Resident in the Middle East.
October 1942: Sir Stafford Cripps retires as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons and leaves the War Cabinet. His successor as Lord Privy Seal is not in the Cabinet, Anthony Eden takes the additional position of Leader of the House of Commons. The Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, enters the Cabinet.
September 1943: Sir John Anderson succeeds Sir Kingsley Wood (deceased) as Chancellor of the Exchequer, remaining in the War Cabinet. Clement Attlee succeeds Anderson as Lord President, remaining also Deputy Prime Minister. Attlee's successor as Dominions Secretary is not in the Cabinet.
November 1943: Lord Woolton enters the Cabinet as Minister of Reconstruction.
[edit]
Winston Churchill's caretaker cabinet, May – July 1945
Winston Churchill — Prime Minister and Minister of Defence
Lord Woolton – Lord President of the Council
Lord Beaverbrook — Lord Privy Seal
Sir John Anderson — Chancellor of the Exchequer
Sir Donald Bradley Somervell — Secretary of State for the Home Department
Anthony Eden — Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Leader of the House of Commons
Oliver Stanley — Secretary of State for the Colonies
Lord Cranborne — Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs and Leader of the House of Lords
Sir P.J. Grigg — Secretary of State for War
Leo Amery — Secretary of State for India and Burma
Lord Rosebery — Secretary of State for Scotland
Harold Macmillan — Secretary of State for Air
Brendan Bracken — First Lord of the Admiralty
Oliver Lyttelton — President of the Board of Trade and Minister of Production
Robert Hudson — Minister of Agriculture
Rab Butler — Minister of Labour
[edit]
Winston Churchill's third cabinet, October 1951 – April 1955
Winston Churchill — Prime Minister and Minister of Defence
Lord Simonds — Lord Chancellor
Lord Woolton — Lord President of the Council
Lord Salisbury — Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords
Rab Butler — Chancellor of the Exchequer
Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe — Secretary of State for the Home Department
Anthony Eden — Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
Oliver Lyttelton — Secretary of State for the Colonies
Lord Ismay — Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations
James Stuart — Secretary of State for Scotland
Peter Thorneycroft — President of the Board of Trade
Lord Cherwell — Paymaster-General
Sir Walter Monckton — Minister of Labour
Harry Crookshank — Minister of Health and Leader of the House of Commons
Harold Macmillan — Minister of Housing and Local Government
Lord Leathers — Minister for the Co-ordination of Transport, Fuel, and Power
[edit]
Changes
March 1952: Lord Salisbury succeeds Lord Ismay as Commonwealth Relations Secretary. Salisbury remains also Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords. Lord Alexander of Tunis succeeds Churchill as Minister of Defence.
May 1952: Harry Crookshank succeeds Lord Salisbury as Lord Privy Seal, remaining Leader of the House of Commons. Salisbury remains Commonwealth Relations Secretary and Leader of the House of Lords. Crookshank's successor as Minister of Health is not in the Cabinet.
November 1952: Lord Woolton becomes Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Lord Salisbury succeeds Lord Woolton as Lord President. Lord Swinton succeeds Lord Salisbury as Commonwealth Relations Secretary.
September 1953: Florence Horsbrugh, the Minister of Education, Sir Thomas Dugdale, the Minister of Agriculture, and Gwilym Lloyd George, the Minister of Food, enter the cabinet. The Ministry for the Co-ordination of Transport, Fuel, and Power, is abolished, and Lord Leathers leaves the Cabinet.
October 1953: Lord Cherwell resigns as Paymaster General. His successor is not in the Cabinet.
July 1954: Alan Lennox-Boyd succeeds Oliver Lyttelton as Colonial Secretary. Derick Heathcoat Amory succeeds Sir Thomas Dugdale as Minister of Agriculture.
October 1954: Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, now Lord Kilmuir, succeeds Lord Simonds as Lord Chancellor. Gwilym Lloyd George succeeds him as Home Secretary. The Food Ministry is merged into the Ministry of Agriculture. Sir David Eccles succeeds Florence Horsbrugh as Minister of Education. Harold Macmillan succeeds Lord Alexander of Tunis as Minister of Defence. Duncan Sandys succeeds Macmillan as Minister of Housing and Local Government. Osbert Peake, the Minister of Pensions and National Insurance, enters