Winston Churchill
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, painted hundreds of canvases, laid bricks for fun and was born two months early at a palace. Meet Winston Churchill.
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Quick Facts
- Born
- 30 November 1874, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire
- Died
- 24 January 1965, London
- Prime Minister
- 1940–45 and 1951–55
- Nobel Prize
- Literature, 1953
- Famous home
- Chartwell, Kent, bought in 1922
- Family
- Married Clementine Hozier in 1908; they had five children
- Hobbies
- Painting, bricklaying, writing, breeding butterflies
- Honour
- Given an honorary US citizenship in 1963
The baby who arrived early at Blenheim
Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was born prematurely at Blenheim Palace, the grandest house in Oxfordshire, on 30 November 1874. He arrived in a ground-floor bedroom, not a grand state apartment. His family was aristocratic: his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a rising Conservative politician, and his grandfather was the Duke of Marlborough. Yet his childhood was far from cosy. Winston was sent to boarding school young, struggled academically, and craved attention from busy parents. He was a poor scholar by his own account and failed the entrance exam for Sandhurst twice before getting in on the third attempt.
A soldier, a prisoner, a celebrity
Before he was Prime Minister, Churchill was a war correspondent and cavalry officer, with a talent for being where the action was. He saw service in India, the Sudan and South Africa. In 1899, during the Boer War, he was captured after an armoured train was ambushed. He escaped from a prison in Pretoria and made his way across hostile territory. His escape made headlines at home, and he was elected MP for Oldham in 1900, still in his twenties. He later served in the First World War trenches, commanding a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1916, after the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, which he had championed, damaged his career.
May 1940: the job nobody was sure he should have
Churchill became Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, the day Germany invaded France and the Low Countries. Many in his own party had doubts. He had changed parties twice, and spent the 1930s in the political wilderness warning about Nazi Germany. His speeches became the sound of the war: "we shall fight on the beaches", "their finest hour" and "never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few". He worked obsessively on them, and the Commons and the wireless carried them across the country. He also worked behind the scenes: building the alliance with Roosevelt's America and the Soviet Union, and backing the codebreakers at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. After victory in Europe in 1945, voters still turned him out in the general election that July, choosing Clement Attlee's Labour instead.
The man who painted, bricklaid and wrote his way to a Nobel
Churchill took up painting in his forties, after the Gallipoli disaster, and called it a lifeline. He produced hundreds of canvases, mostly landscapes and still lifes, and exhibited under a pseudonym at first. At Chartwell, his country home in Kent, he built garden walls and a cottage, and joined a bricklayers' union. He also kept a lake of fish, black swans and, famously, a lot of cigars. His writing was just as prolific. His historical and biographical work, including The World Crisis, Marlborough and The Second World War, helped earn him the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature, which also recognised his oratory.
Quirks and a famous send-off
He liked to work in bed, often dictating to secretaries in the morning, took an afternoon nap to split the day in two, and was known for siren suits, a one-piece garment he wore during the war. He died in January 1965, and his state funeral was the first for a non-royal in decades. The Thames dockers dipped their cranes as his coffin passed by river, and he was buried at St Martin's Church in Bladon, near Blenheim where his life began.
Where you can still see his mark
The Cabinet War Rooms beneath Westminster, now the Churchill War Rooms, still show the underground bunker where he directed the war. Chartwell in Kent is open as a museum with his paintings and studio, and a statue in Parliament Square stands over the Commons he loved. Blenheim Palace has a Churchill exhibition, and his grave in Bladon is a short drive away. Many of his best-known phrases are still quoted in British politics today.
Notable people
- Clementine Churchill
- Lord Randolph Churchill
- Jennie Jerome
- Clement Attlee
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- Joseph Stalin
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