Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer, British statesman, soldier, and author

Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer, 1874–1965, British statesman, soldier, and author; son of Lord Randolph Churchill Churchill, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer, 1849–95, English statesman; son of the 7th duke of Marlborough. A sincere Tory and a founder (1883) of the Primrose League, dedicated to upholding national institutions, he was nonetheless opposed to the traditional
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Early Career

Educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, he became (1894) an officer in the 4th hussars. On leave in 1895, he saw his first military action in Cuba as a reporter for London's Daily Graphic. He served in India and in 1898 fought at Omdurman in Sudan under Kitchener Kitchener, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl
..... Click the link for more information. . Having resigned his commission, he was sent (1899) to cover the South African War by the Morning Post, and his accounts of his capture and imprisonment by the Boers and his escape raised him to the forefront of English journalists.

Political Career

Early Government Posts

Churchill was elected to Parliament as a Conservative in 1900, but he subsequently switched to the Liberal party and was appointed undersecretary for the colonies in the cabinet of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Under Asquith, he was initially (1908–10) president of the Board of Trade, then home secretary (1910–11), and championed innovative labor exchange and old-age pension acts. As first lord of the admiralty (1911), he presided over the naval expansion that preceded World War I.

Discredited by the failure of the Dardanelles expedition, which he had championed, Churchill lost (1915) his admiralty post and served on the front lines in France. Returning to office under Lloyd George, he served as minister of munitions (1917) and secretary of state for war and for air (1918–21). As colonial secretary (1921–22), he helped negotiate the treaty that set up the Irish Free State.

After two defeats at the polls he returned to the House of Commons, as a Constitutionalist, and became (1924–29) chancellor of the exchequer in Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government. As an advocate of laissez-faire economics, he was strongly criticized by John Maynard Keynes Keynes, John Maynard, Baron Keynes of Tilton (kānz)
..... Click the link for more information. . Churchill was not a financial innovator; he basically followed conventional advice from his colleagues. Nevertheless, Churchill's decision to return the country to the prewar gold standard increased unemployment and was a cause of the general strike of 1926. He advocated aggressive action to end the strike, and thus earned the lasting distrust of the labor movement.

World War II

Out of office from 1929 to 1939, Churchill wrote and remained in the public eye with his support for Edward VIII Edward VIII, 1894–1972, king of Great Britain and Ireland (1936), known in later years as the duke of Windsor; eldest son of George V . He attended the naval colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth and Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1911 he was made prince of Wales.
..... Click the link for more information. in the abdication crisis of 1936 and with his vehement opposition to the Indian nationalist movement. He also issued warnings of the threat from Nazi Germany that went unheeded, in part because of his past political and military misjudgments. When World War II broke out (Sept., 1939), Neville Chamberlain Chamberlain, Neville (Arthur Neville Chamberlain), 1869–1940, British statesman; son of Joseph Chamberlain and half brother of Sir Austen Chamberlain .
..... Click the link for more information. appointed him first lord of the admiralty. The following May, when Chamberlain was forced to resign, Churchill became prime minister.

Churchill was one of the truly great orators; his energy and his stubborn public refusal to make peace until Adolf Hitler was crushed were crucial in rallying and maintaining British resistance to Germany during the grim years from 1940 to 1942. He met President Franklin Roosevelt at sea (see Atlantic Charter Atlantic Charter (ətlătĭk, ăt–)
..... Click the link for more information. ) before the entry of the United States into the war, twice addressed the U.S. Congress (Dec., 1941; May, 1942), twice went to Moscow (Aug., 1942; May, 1944), visited battle fronts, and attended a long series of international conferences (see Casablanca Conference Casablanca Conference, Jan. 14–24, 1943, World War II meeting of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Casablanca, French Morocco.
..... Click the link for more information. ; Quebec Conference Quebec Conference, name of two meetings held in Quebec, Canada, in World War II. The first meeting (Aug., 1943) was attended by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, Prime Minister W. L.
..... Click the link for more information. ; Cairo Conference Cairo Conference, Nov. 22–26, 1943, World War II meeting of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of China at Cairo, Egypt.
..... Click the link for more information. ; Tehran Conference Tehran Conference, Nov. 28–Dec. 1, 1943, meeting of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Premier Joseph Stalin at Tehran, Iran.
..... Click the link for more information. ; Yalta Conference Yalta Conference, meeting (Feb. 4–11, 1945), at Yalta, Crimea, USSR, of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin.
..... Click the link for more information. ; Potsdam Conference Potsdam Conference, meeting (July 17–Aug. 2, 1945) of the principal Allies in World War II (the United States, the USSR, and Great Britain) to clarify and implement agreements previously reached at the Yalta Conference .
..... Click the link for more information. ).

The Postwar Period

The British nation supported the vigorous program of Churchill's coalition cabinet until after the surrender of Germany. Then in July, 1945, Britain's desire for rapid social reform led to a Labour electoral victory, and Churchill became leader of the opposition. In 1946, on a visit to the United States, he made a controversial speech at Fulton, Mo., in which he warned of the expansive tendencies of the USSR (he had distrusted the Soviet government since its inception, when he had been a leading advocate of Western intervention to overthrow it) and coined the expression "Iron Curtain."

As prime minister again from 1951 until his resignation in 1955, he ended nationalization of the steel and auto industries but maintained most other socialist measures instituted by the Labour government. In 1953 Churchill was knighted, and awarded the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature for his writing and oratory. He retained a seat in Parliament until 1964. He refused a peerage, but his widow, Clementine Ogilvy Hozier (married 1908), accepted one in 1965 for her charitable work.

Character and Influence

Churchill was undoubtedly one of the greatest public figures of the 20th cent. Extraordinary vitality, imagination, and boldness characterized his whole career. His weaknesses, such as his opposition (except in the case of Ireland) to the expansion of colonial self-government, and his strengths, evidenced by his brilliant war leadership, sprang from the same source—the will to maintain Britain as a great power and a great democracy.

Bibliography

Churchill's biographical and autobiographical works include Lord Randolph Churchill (1906), My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), and the study of his ancestor Marlborough (4 vol., 1933–38). World Crisis (4 vol., 1923–29) is his account of World War I. The Second World War (6 vol., 1948–53) was followed by A History of the English-speaking Peoples (4 vol., 1956–58). See also his speeches ed. by R. R. James (8 vol., 1974) and D. Cannadine (1989); the multivolume study by R. Churchill, his son, and M. Gilbert (1966–78); biographies by W. Manchester (2 vol., 1983–88), M. Gilbert (1992), N. Rose (1995), R. Jenkins (2001), and J. Keegan (2002); A. J. P. Taylor et al., Churchill Revised: A Critical Assessment (1968); R. R. James, Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900–1939 (1970); J. Charmley, Churchill's Grand Alliance (1995); A. Roberts, Eminent Churchillians (1995); J. Lukacs, Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian (2002); J. Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (2003); D. Reynolds, In Command of History (2005).