Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill 1871-1947, American novelist, b. St. Louis, grad. Annapolis, 1894. He wrote several popular historical novels including Richard Carvel (1899), The Crisis (1901), and The Crossing (1904). His later books, such as Coniston (1906), The Inside of the Cup (1913), and The Dwelling-Place of Light (1917), reflected his interest in social, religious, and political problems.

Churchill, Winston (1871–1947), born in St. Louis, graduated from Annapolis (1894), and during his career as author lived mainly in New Hampshire. The Celebrity: An Episode (1898) is an amusing social satire, but with Richard Carvel (1899), a Revolutionary romance, he began his serious consideration of historic forces and ideals in the nation's background. The Crisis (1901), set in St. Louis, deals with society and politics before and during the Civil War, while The Crossing (1904), considered his finest work, is a romance concerned with the settling of Kentucky and the part the frontier played in the Revolution. From this celebration of the romantic aspects of manifest destiny and the heroism of early Americans, Churchill turned to contemporary politics, although his methods continued to be those of the popular romancer; most of his character portraits were superficial and his handling of plot was arbitrary. Coniston (1906), concerned with ethical conflicts in New England politics of the mid‐19th century, has for its central figure Jethro Bass, Churchill's most striking character. Mr. Crewe's Career (1908) tells of a railroad monopoly's attempt to dominate a state government, and A Far Country (1915) is a story of the conflict of private interests with public‐spirited idealism in a Midwestern city. This interest also resulted in the author's participation in New Hampshire politics, and he became a member of the state legislature and a candidate for the governorship. His other novels include A Modern Chronicle (1910), concerned with the problem of divorce; The Inside of the Cup (1913), dealing with the need of religion to adapt itself to modern conditions; and The Dwelling Place of Light (1917), the story of a New England factory strike. Dr. Jonathan (1919) is a play set in a New England mill town, intended to show that World War I stimulated the extension of industrial democracy. Churchill's only subsequent writing is The Uncharted Way (1940), a profession of religious belief, combining faith in self‐abnegating Christian love with an evolutionary hypothesis concerning an afterlife.

Churchill, Winston S. (1874–1965), British statesman, prime minister 1940–5 and 1951–5. Some of Churchill's earliest memories were of Dublin where his grandfather, the duke of Marlborough, was viceroy, with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, as private secretary. By the time of the third home rule bill, Churchill was 1st lord of the admiralty in Asquith's government. In 1912, perhaps prompted by his father's views in 1886, he joined Lloyd George in advocating some kind of Ulster exclusion. Even so, his advocacy of home rule provoked strong unionist protests when he visited Belfast in February 1912. A speech at Bradford on 14 March 1914, in which he accused Carson of engaging in a treasonable conspiracy, heightened tension just days before the Curragh incident. As secretary of state for war in Lloyd George's government, he supported the formation of the ‘Black and Tans’ and the Ulster Special Constabulary, arguing for strong measures against Sinn Féin. He was a member of the British negotiating team during the negotiation of the Anglo‐Irish treaty, coming to respect Michael Collins. He criticized the return of the treaty ports in 1938 as part of the policy of appeasement. In June 1940 his government briefly flirted with the idea of enticing de Valera to enter the Second World War on the promise of unity, but he came to resent Ireland's neutral stance. His radio broadcast of 13 May 1945, in which he extolled the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland while accusing de Valera's government of frolicking with the Germans and Japanese, was bitterly resented.

T. G. Fraser