A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was born in 1874. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill and he was the grandson of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. Winston Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.
At age eight his parents enrolled him in St. George’s, a boarding school at Ascot. He wrote to them that he was happy there, but actually he hated it and did not do well at all. His teachers thought he was “a very naughty boy”, and he was frequently punished. He ranked last in his class and was considered lazy. His headmaster said of him, “He is a constant trouble to everybody and is always in some scrape or other. He cannot be trusted to behave himself anywhere.”
Later he was schooled at Harrow and went to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and gained a commission in the Fourth Hussars. He saw some military action and took part in the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.
During the Boer War, he was a war correspondent. Winston Churchill was captured, held a prisoner and escaped. After this, Winston Churchill went into politics.
- Winston Churchill
When war broke out in 1939, Churchill became first lord of the Admiralty. In May, 1940, he became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence and remained in office until 1945. He took over the premiership again in the Conservative victory of 1951 and resigned in 1955.
His refusal to surrender to Nazi Germany inspired the country. His famous “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech was his first as Prime Minister. He followed that closely, prior to the Battle of Britain, with “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”. He worked tirelessly throughout the war, building strong relations with US President Roosevelt while maintaining a sometimes difficult alliance with the Soviet Union.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill joins Royal Family 1945 on the balcony at Buckingham Palace
Churchill also remained in London during the Blitz and regularly visited areas bombed out by the Luftwaffe. To the people of London, he was one of them and a man who could have removed himself from the dangers of German bombers, but refused to – staying in bombed out London along with those who suffered. In 1953 Queen Elizabeth knighted him and he became “Sir Winston Churchill”, a member of the highest order of British knighthood.
In 1951, he became prime minister again. As well as his many political achievements, he left a legacy of an impressive number of publications and in 1953 won the Nobel Prize for Literature with The Second World War.
Churchill proposed to Clementine Hozier and in 1908, they were married. The couple had four children. In 1922 Churchill bought Chartwell, which would be Winston’s home until his death in 1965. At Churchill’s request, he was buried in the family plot at Saint Martin’s Churchyard, Bladon, Woodstock, England.
Churchill was voted as “The Greatest Briton” in 2002 “100 Greatest Britons” poll sponsored by the BBC and voted for by the public. He was also named Time Magazine “Man of the Half-Century” in the early 1950s.
