Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer

Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer (1874–1965). Prime minister. Churchill was born at Blenheim palace in 1874, the elder son of Lord Randolph Churchill. His mother was the American heiress Jennie Jerome. Educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, he served with the 4th Hussars and rode in the lancers' charge at Omdurman. Between 1899 and 1900 he was a war correspondent in South Africa, where he was captured by the Boers but escaped. He saw active service in the trenches for a few months in 1916.

In 1900 he entered the House of Commons as a Conservative but crossed the floor within four years to join the Liberals on the issue of free trade. Returned as a Liberal at the next election, he gained his first ministerial experience under Campbell‐Bannerman as under‐secretary for the colonies. Asquith brought him into the cabinet at the age of 33 as president of the Board of Trade (1908) and moved him to the Home Office before he had reached the age of 35 (1910). By now Churchill had married Clementine Hozier (1908) who provided him with a stable emotional base for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, along with Lloyd George, he played a major part in laying the foundations of the welfare state by establishing labour exchanges and social insurance. His tenure of the Home Office, on the other hand, is remembered for the myth that he sent troops to Wales to crush the striking miners of Tonypandy (1910).

In 1911 he became 1st lord of the Admiralty and a figure of significance. Completing the work of Admiral Fisher, he replaced dreadnoughts with super‐dreadnoughts, established a naval air service, and began the conversion of the fleet from coal to oil. Having the fleet ready was one of Churchill's contributions to the British war effort between 1914 and 1918. Another was the part he played in the development of the tank. However, he was remembered most of all for conceiving the 1915 Dardanelles campaign, designed to shorten the war by removing Turkey and allowing the western allies to link up with Russia. The attack on Gallipoli failed due to naval delays. In its wake, Asquith was forced to form a coalition with the Conservatives, who loathed Churchill as a renegade, and had him transferred to become chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. Lacking any influence over the course of the war, Churchill resigned and took command of a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in France. A few months later he was recalled by Lloyd George to become minister of munitions. Between 1918 and 1920 he was secretary of state for war and air, in which capacity he was responsible for running down the planned post‐war Royal Air Force from 154 squadrons to 24, with only two for home defence. His attempts to persuade his colleagues to overthrow the Bolsheviks in Russia were unsuccessful.

In 1921 he became colonial secretary and made a treaty with the Irish Free State. He also negotiated a peace settlement with the Arabs, advised by T. E. Lawrence. Although he opposed Lloyd George's policy towards the Turks, he gave his prime minister vociferous support over the Chanak crisis of 1922. When the coalition fell a few months later, he was defeated in the 1922 election and began work on his history of the First World War, the first volume of which was published in 1923. A friend quipped: ‘Winston has written an enormous book about himself and called it The World Crisis.’

Returning to the Commons in October 1924, he was offered the chancellorship of the Exchequer by Baldwin and rejoined the Conservative Party. In 1925 he put Great Britain back on the gold standard, unfortunately at the pre‐war parity of £1 = $1, which was of little help to British exporters. Three years later he introduced the ‘ten‐year rule’, whereby the service estimates would be prepared on the assumption that no war was likely for the next ten years. Meanwhile, he was only prevented from running down the navy as he had already run down the RAF by the threatened resignation of the entire Board of Admiralty. In the General Strike of 1926, he took overall command of the government newspaper the British Gazette. Churchill's star, however, was set to wane. With the fall of Baldwin's government in 1929, he was out of office for the next ten years.

Churchill himself turned the 1930s into his wilderness years. His attacks on constitutional progress in India and his defence of Edward VIII found little response. Nor was Churchill able to capture the public imagination as the foe of fascism. He admired Mussolini and sympathized with Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Finally, on the great economic questions of the day—unemployment, protection, recovery—he had little to say.

Churchill did however take up the cause of resistance to Nazi Germany. There were many obstacles to this. The Treasury in particular opposed rearmament: after a year of war, Britain, it predicted, would be bankrupt. The Foreign Office asked just who our allies were going to be. America was neutral, the dominions unpredictable, and even if the Soviets could be brought in, an alliance with them might push Franco into the arms of the axis and close off the Mediterranean. The appeasers, therefore, had a good case. Churchill did not believe that war was inevitable and knew that Hitler wanted Britain as an ally. However, he believed that a grand alliance against the dictator would make him moderate his plans. If not, perhaps he could be overthrown before it came to war. But if Germany would not see reason, then war it would be. He envisaged that war, however, as one in which Britain would make her contribution with sea and air power. He thought a continental army a mistake.

When war came, Churchill returned to the Admiralty, although he acted as if he were already prime minister. Almost immediately he became involved in a madcap scheme to send an expeditionary force to Norway, ostensibly to help save Finland from the Russians, but in practice to cut off Swedish iron ore from the Germans. The lack of air cover meant that the campaign was a disaster. Ironically, Chamberlain was blamed and Churchill became prime minister at the head of a national government.

As war leader, Churchill was a mixture of ruthlessness and impetuosity. Determined to do everything possible to win the war, in practice he had few means of doing so. Still, he did what he could, which meant the bombing offensive, plus the Mediterranean campaign. Determined to have action, he prodded and sacked his generals and made many mistakes—sinking the French fleet at Oran, invading Greece, defending Crete, neglecting the Far East. Yet his position as prime minister was secure, since he had become in the summer of 1940 the spirit of British resistance incarnate, defying the Nazis with speeches of supreme eloquence. His real hope of victory depended on the entry of the USA, and when that happened, Churchill persuaded the Americans to make Europe the primary theatre of the war and to participate in the north African campaign. When Hitler attacked Stalin, he immediately offered aid to the Soviets. Towards the end of the war, in October 1944, aware of US plans to send their troops home once the war was over, he signed the Percentages agreement with Stalin, dividing the Balkans into spheres of influence and saving Greece from communism. As war leader, Churchill had little time for the home front. Nor was he much interested in post‐war planning. When the Beveridge Report was published in 1942, he doubted whether a bankrupt Britain would be able to afford it. In any case, he had left domestic affairs to Attlee and his Labour colleagues, which proved a mistake. For it was to them that the electorate turned in July 1945 once victory had been secured. Churchill was still respected, but the voters guessed that he was not the man for post‐war reconstruction. But as leader of the Conservative Party and of the opposition, he was more politically secure than he had ever been before in peacetime. His voice continued to be heard in international affairs and, just as he had warned against the rising threat from Hitler, he now warned against the ‘iron curtain’ which was descending over Europe. He also spoke out in favour of a united Europe, although he never meant that Britain should be part of it.

In 1951 he returned as prime minister. He was now 77 years old, had suffered two strokes, and would suffer two more. Yet his government was highly successful. Eden shone as foreign secretary, Macmillan built a record number of council houses, and nothing was done to undermine the welfare state, inherited from Labour. In April 1955 he agreed to retire as prime minister, completing a career without equal among democratic politicians. He died in 1965, soon after retiring from the Commons, was given a state funeral, and was buried in Bladon churchyard.