Winston Churchill - Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister Documentary

The man known to history as Winston Churchill was born as Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill on the 30th of November 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, one of England’s finest stately homes. His father was Lord Randolph Churchill, who came from one of England’s most illustrious noble families. He was descended from John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, a distinguished soldier and statesman whose military career spanned the reigns of five monarchs in the 17th and early 18th centuries. His role in defeating the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685 helped secure the throne for James II, and for which he

was awarded the title of Earl of Marlborough. He also displayed considerable diplomatic and political ability. Winston’s father Randolph was himself a significant political voice in Britain in the late nineteenth century, but his rise within the Conservative Party was stymied by his opposition to Lord Salisbury who dominated the Conservatives in the 1880s and 1890s. Winston’s mother Jennie was American, the daughter of a New York financier and businessman, Leonard Jerome. Her marriage to Randolph in April 1874, just over half a year before Winston was born, followed a short courtship and was one of several high-profile marriages between

members of the British aristocracy and the daughters of newly wealthy American businessmen during the so-called Gilded Age of immense economic change in America. Often the British noble family in question gained a cash injection into their declining financial fortunes and the American family acquired the social prestige of being tied into the old nobility of England. In any event the marriage was never happy and Jennie engaged in a string of affairs over the next twenty years. For his part Winston’s father reputedly suffered from syphilis and would eventually die aged 45 in 1895. Yet the problems of their

marriage did not prevent Randolph and Jennie from having a second child, Winston’s younger brother, John, who was born in 1880. Winston’s childhood was somewhat typical of the British upper class in the late Victorian period. He and John were effectively raised by a nanny by the name of Elizabeth Everest at various locations at Blenheim, in London and for a time in Ireland, at the time part of the United Kingdom, where the Churchills relocated in the late 1870s as Winston’s grandfather was appointed as Viceroy. In the early 1880s he was sent to attend the eminent St George’s

School at Ascot in Berkshire, but, in sharp contrast to his later literary career, he did not show a keen academic mind in his youth and his behaviour was regularly reprimanded. Despite this, in 1888 he narrowly passed the entrance exam and entered Harrow School in London, an ancient educational establishment dating back over four centuries. It was, though, his father’s wish that he would spend some time abroad in the military at a time when Britain’s empire was at its greatest height and was spreading rapidly over parts of Africa. Consequently, he took the entrance exam on several occasions

for the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, the foremost military school in Britain. He eventually was admitted in 1893 and spent just over a year there acquiring his stripes. By that time his father had died and Winston effectively became the head of the family at just 18 years of age. He did not have time to settle into this new position, as having graduated from Sandhurst in the first weeks of 1895, Winston was immediately commissioned as a second lieutenant in the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars. With the Hussars he was soon being dispatched across the Atlantic Ocean. A

war of independence, one of many which had been launched on the island in the nineteenth century, was being fought in Cuba by the colonial community against Spanish rule. Spain was desperate to maintain control of one of the last few remaining pockets of what had once been its vast colonial empire in the Americas. They would eventually lose the war, with America providing aid to the Cubans and replacing the Spanish as the imperial overlords. Churchill, was there to observe the fighting for the British government, in late 1895, and began his publishing career rather modestly by sending back

dispatches about the war effort for publication in the Daily Graphic, a weekly graphic newspaper published in Britain in the late nineteenth century. A brief visit to his mother’s homeland, with a sojourn in New York City, followed. In the autumn of 1896 the Queen’s Own Hussars were reassigned to Bombay, one of Britain’s oldest colonial possessions in India and at the time one of the administrative and military centres of the British Raj. He would spend the next year and a half here. The India episode is noteworthy for his having accompanied the Malakand Field Force which was commanded

by Sir Bindon Blood and which in 1897 headed north to the region around Peshawar. There they began a campaign to suppress the revolt of the Mohmands, a Pashtun tribe who for two years in the late 1890s offered extensive resistance to British rule in what was then considered the north-west of India, but which is today part of Pakistan. Other than this, Churchill made several visits to Calcutta and was engaged in a tour of much of the rest of the subcontinent. Many of Churchill’s views on the value of British imperialism, and the inferiority of the subject peoples

of the empire to the British in terms of the development of their societies and cultures were fashioned from his experiences here and they would have a life-long bearing on his views and consequently his policies. Back in England in 1898 some of Churchill’s political opinions began to come to maturity as he flirted with political life for the first time, favouring the Liberal Party, but for the fact that he was deeply opposed to their willingness to grant Home Rule or self-governance to Ireland. He did not remain at home for long though, and within weeks was preparing to

head to Africa where Britain had been engaged in an ambitious effort to acquire control of a continuous block of land running from Egypt in the north, down to South Africa. By the mid-1890s this had brought the British into conflict with the Mahdist Islamic forces which controlled much of the Sudan region. Churchill succeeded in obtaining a position in the expeditionary force which was dispatched to the region in 1898 under the command of General Horatio Herbert Kitchener. As he arrived there in the early autumn he was also writing reports on the expedition for The Morning Post back

in Britain. These detailed the events at the Battle of Omdurman which Churchill witnessed first-hand. This engagement, fought on the 2nd of September 1898 near Khartoum in Sudan, saw a combined British and Egyptian force of approximately 25,000 men heavily defeat a Sudanese army over twice its size. Here was a classic example of how European armies equipped with the latest machine guns and other weaponry were able to overcome enemy forces which were numerically superior, but technologically and tactically inferior. Curiously enough, despite his later reputation as Britain’s war leader, Churchill had mixed feelings about what he saw at

Omdurman. Writing to his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, just a few weeks later he stated that the battle was a wonderful spectacle, but that he was generally appalled by the barbarity with which the campaign had been carried out, notably the murder of wounded enemy combatants and a callous disregard for the welfare of the Egyptians and Sudanese who made up the bulk of the British expeditionary force. His judgment of Kitchener as a tactician was also damning. Churchill’s literary life was also expanding during these years. While he was in India his reading habits had changed and he

had voraciously absorbed everything from Plato to Charles Darwin’s Origins of the Species. A particularly notable influence on his later work which he read at this time was Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, an enormous work considered the greatest piece of historical writing of the British Enlightenment. He had also begun writing more himself and in 1898 had produced his first book entitled The Story of the Malakand Field Force based on his experiences campaigning against the Mohmands in the north-west of the British Raj. A fictional work called Savrola which he

composed around the same time proved to be his first and last effort at writing a romance novel. In Africa his writing habits coalesced into more political topics, not just in terms of his reportage for the Morning Post, but in the composition of an account of the wider campaign, one which was eventually published in 1899 as The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan, a work which examined not just the events Churchill had witnessed himself, but also the background to the campaign in the mid-1890s. Following his return to Britain from the Sudan

expedition Churchill made it clear that he intended to enter politics and take up the mantle which his father had held as being something of a non-conforming member of the Conservative Party. He stood in a by-election in the constituency of Oldham in Lancashire in 1899, but narrowly missed out to a candidate from the Liberal Party, the Conservatives’ main rival for power in the late nineteenth century. His failure to take the Oldham seat left Churchill at enough of a loose end that he determined to head for British South Africa where conflict with the Boer states, known as

the Orange Free State and the South African Republic or Transvaal, which had been formed to the north-east of the British colony, seemed imminent. Tensions had been rising here for years between the Boers, descendants of Dutch, German and French Huguenot settlers who had migrated to South Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to establish their own colonies independent of Britain, only for huge gold and diamond mines to be discovered in the vicinity, prompting the British to seek to annex the newly created Boer states. War finally erupted in the autumn of 1899, in a conflict known as

the Second Boer War. Churchill arrived to South Africa as a reporter for the Morning Post just as the war was breaking out. He was rather infamously taken prisoner by the Boers in the first weeks of the conflict when a train he was travelling in derailed, however he soon escaped from the prisoner-of-war camp he was being detained in and made his way over the northern border to Portuguese East Africa. Thereafter he quickly made his way back south and re-joined the British army in time to participate in the siege of Ladysmith, a major conflict which led in

the spring of 1900 to the capture of Pretoria, the capital of the Boer South African Republic. Thereafter a guerrilla war developed, one which would drag on for another two years and in the course of which the British resorted to scorched earth policies and the use of concentration camps to detain thousands of Boers. Churchill, though, would never see this part of the conflict. After being one of the first to enter Pretoria in the summer of 1900 he had drawn up his account of the war in a new book which he entitled Ian Hamilton’s March after one

of Britain’s leading military commanders in the war. Churchill then departed for home and another shot at a parliamentary seat. The period of the Second Boer War also saw the emergence of Churchill’s penchant for alcohol. At one point he headed off to the front lines of the combat in South Africa with 36 bottles of wine, 18 bottles of scotch whiskey and a half a dozen bottles of vintage brandy loaded up as part of his extensive luggage. This was not some random act of over planning. Churchill was a heavy drinker throughout his entire adult life. Years later

in London he developed a routine whereby he would begin the day with one or two whiskey and sodas in the morning. Lunch would usually be accompanied by a pint of either wine or champagne, sometimes with a brandy afterwards. The process was repeated at dinner, followed by one or two brandies and soda in the evening. By modern standards Churchill was an alcoholic, though undoubtedly a high functioning one. But there is little evidence to indicate that this prodigious drinking ever impacted on Churchill’s ability to carry out his work or clouded his judgement. Moreover, it was highly structured,

with a gradual intake of alcohol at intervals throughout the day. Indeed, what is striking, as will become clear, is that Churchill was able to maintain the level of activity and accomplishment which he did over his entire adult life while drinking at this elevated level. Back in Britain the Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, had decided to call a snap general election for October 1900, hoping to benefit from positive public sentiment about his government’s handling of the Second Boer War. Churchill once again stood for the Oldham seat which he had narrowly missed out on in the by-election

the previous year. This time he won and he entered Westminster for the first time as a 25 year old. Incidentally, the 1900 election was also significant as marking the first time that the Labour Representation Committee ran candidates in a British national election. They would do so again with much greater success in years to come as the Labour Party and would soon become the principal political opponents of Churchill domestically in Britain. All that was to come. In 1900 the Liberals remained the Conservatives’ primary opponents, though they failed to retake parliament in the election and Salisbury formed

a new Conservative administration. Churchill made an impression with his maiden speech in February 1901 in which he expressed some sympathy for the Boer cause in South Africa and claimed that if he were a Boer himself he should hope that he would be fighting in the field against the British. It was the first of many controversial and nuanced stances he would adopt in the course of over fifty years as a member of the British parliament. From the beginning of his parliamentary career Churchill was noted as being on what were deemed to be excessively friendly grounds with

many senior members of the Liberal Party, notably the former Home Secretary, Herbert Asquith. Friendly acquaintances were one thing, but Churchill was also ideologically aligned with the Liberals on several issues. A key political division between the Conservatives and the Liberals around the turn of the century was that the Conservatives favoured economic protectionism, while the Liberals were free traders who believed that Britain could benefit if it opened up its vast markets to German, French, American and Russian trade. Churchill tended to favour the Liberal view. He also held views opposed by the leadership of the Conservative Party under

Salisbury on issues like military spending, the political resolution of South Africa following the Boer War and the Irish Question, a perennial bugbear of UK politics which had divided parliamentarians at Westminster for decades. Aware that his views could preclude him from any promotion within the current Conservative Party, Churchill toyed for a time with establishing his own party which would combine elements of Liberal and Conservative policies, but eventually, in 1904, having been informed that he would not be selected to run for his seat in Oldham again at the next election by the Conservative Party, he crossed the

aisle and joined the Liberals. He would spend the next 18 years as a Liberal MP. Churchill was profoundly influenced by events which followed in his personal life in the mid-1900s. At this time he met and began courting Clementine Hozier, a daughter of Sir Henry Hozier, a member of the British gentry, and a relative of the earl of Airlie on her mother’s side. They married at the Church of St Margaret in Westminster Abbey in 1908. Clementine provided a rock of stability for Winston for the remainder of their long lives together. Theirs was not a marriage of

convenience or one which had been put together for political reasons, but one based on genuine respect and affection. They quickly moved into a house in Eccleston Square in Pimlico in London where their first child, a daughter named Diana, was born in 1909. Four more children followed. Randolph, named after his grandfather, was born in 1911, followed by Sarah in 1914. A third daughter, Marigold, was born in 1918, though sadly she died of sepsis of the throat in 1921 before reaching her third birthday, an occurrence which caused Churchill considerable distress for the remainder of his life. A

year later their final child, Mary, was born. The following year the Churchills relocated to Kent where they moved into a grand country house at Chartwell, one where Winston and Clementine would reside for the remainder of their lives when not occupying one of the august buildings on Downing Street in London. In the 1906 general election, held in the first weeks of the year, the Liberal Party under Henry Campbell-Bannerman won a landslide victory over the Conservatives. Churchill’s former party had been deeply divided over the free trade issue, allowing the Liberals to outflank them and Campbell-Bannerman to become

Prime Minister. He would only last in that office until 1908, though, as he suffered a series of heart attacks in 1907. His eventual resignation would allow for Churchill’s longstanding ally, Herbert Asquith, to succeed as Prime Minister. Churchill was soon promoted to the position of President of the Board of Trade, with David Lloyd George, a Welsh politician and rising star within the Liberal Party, becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer. As President of the Board of Trade Churchill was responsible for overseeing a wide range of matters related to industrial relations and negotiations with the trade unions at a

time when militant labour strike actions were occurring not just in Britain, but across Europe and North America. Churchill’s attitude towards these developments was quite evolved. He introduced a series of liberal reforms such as the Mines Eight Hours Bill, which restricted mine workers to working a maximum of eight hours per day, and the Labour Exchanges Bill to set up hundreds of centres offering payments to those who were temporarily unemployed. All of this was with the goal of easing social tensions in Britain, reducing strike action, and quelling the rise of the newly christened Labour Party who had

won dozens of seats in the 1906 general election. In 1910 Churchill was promoted to the post of Home Secretary, one of the great offices of state. In this capacity he was effectively in charge of domestic security, including policing services, immigration and the borders, the prison system and elements of the judicial system. The primary issue facing the Home Office in the early twentieth century was the growing movement amongst the Suffragists and other liberal groups for women to be given the right to vote in Britain. Churchill had publicly stated his opposition back in the late 1890s, but

now over a decade later he was more amenable to the idea, provided that a majority of male voters in Britain were in favour. To that end he proposed a national referendum on the matter, but there was no agreement and the suffrage issue would drag on throughout the 1910s. In 1911, after Asquith’s Liberals secured a second term in office, Churchill was appointed as First Lord of the Admiralty. This effectively placed Churchill in charge of the Royal Navy at a time when Britain’s naval power was still paramount globally and was the backbone of its vast empire. He

would remain in that office for several years as Europe headed towards a calamitous war. In the early 1910s the primary issue which seemed to be facing Asquith, Churchill and the Liberals in office was the resolution of the Irish Question. For decades the Irish political establishment had been demanding devolved government in Dublin in the shape of Home Rule, but this had been blocked by Unionists in the north of Ireland who were determined to block any drift away from British rule in the country. Churchill was on the side of the Home Rulers, viewing the Unionist calls for

Ireland to be partitioned as unacceptable. However, just as the Home Rule issue seemed to be nearing a successful conclusion in 1913 and 1914, war suddenly interrupted everything. For years tensions had been brewing between the major European powers over a wide range of matters, not least colonial rivalry in Africa and the nationalist powder-keg that the Balkans had become. In the end it was the latter region that provided the spark for war when the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a Serb nationalist on the 28th of June 1914. In

the weeks that followed a regional crisis escalated into a full blown European war as Britain, France and the Russian Empire went to war with Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. It would soon become known as the First World War as the theatre of operations expanded to every corner of the globe. Churchill’s role in the First World War is usually remembered for all the wrong reasons. Much of his work was concerned with organising massive troop movements across the English Channel in the first weeks and months of the war as the focus of the conflict became the

trenches of north-eastern France where the French and British squared off against the Germans. However, Churchill had a grander plan involved for the navy. He believed that pressure could be relieved on the Western Front in France by striking a blow against the Ottoman Empire. This would reduce the number of troops which Britain’s ally Russia needed to commit to the campaign against the Turks in the Caucasus and so would allow the Russians to focus more soldiers to the Eastern Front in Poland and Ukraine against the Germans. And this in turn would force the Germans to draw troops

away from France to Poland. Churchill’s approach to weakening the Turks was to launch a major naval assault on the Straits of Gallipoli, the entryway into the Bosphorus, the internationally significant waterway in Istanbul. If successful it might even prove possible to capture Istanbul and knock the Ottomans out of the war completely. He quickly convinced Asquith’s cabinet and in the spring a major British expeditionary force, of which troops from Australia and New Zealand made up a huge proportion, was dispatched to Gallipoli. The Gallipoli Campaign turned into one of the most disastrous British strategic errors of the war.

It would drag on for a year between the spring of 1915 and 1916, with nearly half a million British, ANZAC, Irish, French and Indian troops committed to the effort. However, it soon turned into a debacle as the expeditionary force made landfall on the Gallipoli Peninsula in a location where the Ottomans had much better strategic positions and after curbing the initial British attack on their positions effectively placed the British and their allied troops under siege at Gallipoli. Months of attritional warfare followed, during the course of which the British expeditionary force suffered over 50,000 casualties, with a

quarter of a million more men wounded or otherwise incapacitated. It proved to be one of the greatest setbacks of Churchill’s career. As the extent of the blunder was revealed in the course of 1915 it was made clear that he had lost the confidence of the wartime cabinet in London and he was removed from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty as Asquith relented to pressure from the Conservatives, as the various parties in Britain moved to form a wartime coalition. Churchill responded energetically to this change in his fortunes. He determined to rejoin the military and

spent some time in 1916 leading a unit on the Western Front in France. When he returned to the House of Commons some months later it was with a new appreciation of the lot of the common soldier and he called for steel helmets to be issued to all the rank and file, a necessity which Churchill had become aware of when he had nearly been killed by a piece of shrapnel himself while in France. 1917 also brought a change in his political fortunes as the Dardanelles Commission reported that Churchill was not directly responsible for the failures at

Gallipoli, while the replacement of Asquith as Prime Minister by David Lloyd George saw Churchill appointed as Minister of Munitions. In this role he was primarily responsible for ensuring that the domestic economy ran in such a way as to ensure that enough bullets, artillery and other explosives were being produced to keep the war effort going. Much of the work involved negotiating an end to strike actions as they arose in British munitions factories. It was not glamorous work, but it had impact. Britain, and with it France, the United States and Italy, ultimately won the war in November

1918 because their domestic economies proved more resilient in wartime than those of Germany, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. The Germans overall won far more battles than they lost during the First World War, but as they ran out of key resources at home, social and political unrest set in and the country collapsed into political and social turmoil in the late autumn of 1918, bringing the war to an end. The end of the First World War did not bring peace to Europe. With civil wars erupting across much of the continent as old empires collapsed, the years between

1918 and 1923 would actually be bloodier than the four years of war which preceded them. Churchill spent the first part of this period serving as Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air in a government which continued to be headed by David Lloyd George as Prime Minister. In these dual roles Churchill was responsible for overseeing large elements of the process of demobilizing millions of British and allied troops. His attitudes towards the defeated countries were mixed. On the one hand Churchill wished for a large military presence to be maintained by Britain and France

in Germany after the cessation of hostilities, but unlike many British and French statesmen of the time he cautioned against an overly punitive approach to the peace talks. He viewed Germany as a potential ally against the greater enemy which was emerging to the east in Russia, where the Bolshevik Communists had seized power in a revolution in the late autumn of 1917. A bloody civil war followed there down to the early 1920s, during the course of which Britain sent its own expeditionary force to northern Russia to assist the counter-revolutionaries. As minister for war Churchill was deeply involved

in these efforts and consistently pushed an anti-Soviet line. Elsewhere Churchill demonstrated a brutal streak in the post-war period. Some of this was in evidence in the Middle East, where Britain and France between them had carved up the former Ottoman Empire into mandates or occupied territories. The British had control of Iraq, a country which posed governance problems from the start as the Kurdish people in the north of the country were perennially opposed to foreign rule, whether by the Ottomans or the British. A major insurgency had developed here by 1920 and it was at this juncture that

Churchill proposed that chemical weapons could be used here, stating that he believed it was reasonable to experiment with such weapons against uncivilized tribes. In the end extensive use of chemical weapons did not occur in Iraq and Kurdistan at this time, but as several studies since have demonstrated this was not owing to any moral scruples, but simply that it did not prove logistically possible to do so. This particular episode does not reflect well on Churchill in retrospect, although there is no concrete evidence that any chemical weapons were ever used and it should also be noted chemical

weapons such as Mustard Gas had been widespread in the first World War and it was not until the 1925 Geneva Protocol that such weapons were formally banned under an international agreement. However, his attitudes towards Ireland in the early 1920s were problematic. Churchill had long been a moderate when it came to Ireland, a country in which the majority of the Roman Catholic population throughout the island desired independence from Britain. This was stymied by a Unionist majority in the north of the country who favoured a continuing attachment to Britain, along with elements within the British political system

who did not wish to relinquish control of the island. Churchill had openly condemned the Unionist argument that Ireland could be partitioned and the north allowed to remain within the United Kingdom. Yet when a bitter war of independence broke out against British rule in the aftermath of the First World War, Churchill’s attitude seemed to change. He was, for instance, in favour of the actions of the Black and Tans, units of demobilised British paramilitaries, who were sent into Ireland in 1920 and who over the next year and a half engaged in a brutal campaign of pillaging, and

killings, supposedly in response to IRA attacks, but which inevitably damaged Britain’s standing in Ireland as the force acted as a law unto itself. This support for the Black and Tans aside, Churchill was well aware of the need for a negotiated peace and in the course of 1921 he was central to the negotiations which led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, an agreement whereby Ireland, excluding the Unionist north, would achieve independence from Britain, within what was termed as the ‘community of nations known as the British Empire.’. In February 1921 Churchill was appointed as Secretary of State for the

Colonies, a significant brief within government in the aftermath of the First World War as Britain’s already sizeable empire had expanded as a result of the transfer of lands from the Ottoman Empire and Germany’s colonies into British and French possession. His main concerns during this period were with the Middle East where many of the native people in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula had allied with Britain against the Ottomans during the war and now felt betrayed that they seemed to have swapped one imperial overlord in the form of the Turks for another in the shape of

Britain. This was particularly the case in Palestine where the Palestinian population was perturbed by the accelerated drive amongst Jewish Zionists to establish a new Jewish state. Churchill was sympathetic towards the Jewish cause, but this was tempered following a week of rioting in early May 1921 in the city of Jaffa incited by the Jewish Communist Party and during which dozens were killed and hundreds more wounded. The antagonists’ declared goal was to remove British rule from the Levant and establish a Soviet Palestine, which did nothing to endear Churchill to the Jewish cause in Palestine. Ultimately his time

as Secretary of State for Colonies was short-lived. In the autumn of 1922 a crisis developed over the British policing of the Dardanelles neutral zone near Gallipoli, the site of Churchill’s ignominious defeat as First Lord of the Admiralty a few years earlier. The crisis split the Liberals and the Conservatives in parliament in Britain and led to a snap general election in November 1922 in which Churchill lost his seat as an MP. He failed to regain it when a new election was quickly called in 1923. This latter election was notable for the entry into power of the

Labour Party who formed a British government for the first time. This shift in the British political establishment also saw Churchill reappraise his own political allegiances. The Liberals proved willing to offer tacit support to the Labour Party on a contractual basis. For Churchill, who looked with extreme concern at the possibility of the Labour Party aligning Britain with Soviet Russia, the political map of the nation had now been completely redrawn. Politics in Britain, he believed, was now a tussle between the Conservatives and the Labour Party, with the Liberals increasingly becoming a minor third party. Unsurprisingly, by 1924,

even before a new election was called, Churchill had effectively rejoined the Conservatives two decades after he had switched to the Liberals. As a tactical political decision Churchill’s move was inspired. A new general election was held on the 29th of October 1924, the third in two years, following the collapse of the minority Labour government. Churchill won a new seat for the constituency of Epping and the Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin won a huge parliamentary majority. Just days after officially rejoining the Conservatives, Churchill was appointed as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He would oversee British finances for nearly half

a decade down to the summer of 1929. His tenure of the position, second in importance only to that of Prime Minister in the British political system, is most noted for his decision to restore the gold standard, whereby the pound sterling, Britain’s currency, was tied to the gold reserves of the nation and the global price for gold. This had been the case for western nation states for centuries but had been temporarily abandoned by Britain with the onset of war in 1914. Churchill’s decision to re-establish the gold standard is perceived to have had both positive and negative

effects. On the one hand it led to a significant period of deflation which was much needed in the aftermath of the huge levels of state expenditure which had been incurred during and after the war. However, conversely it is now understood to have led to significant job losses and unemployment across Britain, particularly in coal and steel jobs which had formed the basis of Industrial Britain for a century and a half. A new general election was called in Britain in the summer of 1929 as Baldwin’s government’s time in office wound down. The Conservatives lost power to the

Labour Party, who would only remain in power for two years before a national government was formed in 1931 in response to the crisis brought about by the Wall Street financial crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed in its wake. However, with Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberals and other groups such as the Liberal Nationals all forming part of the cabinet, as well as a number of independent technocrats, there was no place in government for Churchill, who had continued to hold his seat in the Epping constituency during these years. This absence from the centre of

power would continue for most of the 1930s as Churchill was overlooked again in Baldwin’s cabinet when the Conservatives returned to power in their own right in the mid-1930s. Consequently, the period from his exit from the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1929 down to the late 1930s when he would make a remarkable return to political prominence, are generally known as the ‘Wilderness Years’ of Churchill’s political career. Scholars have speculated that Churchill may have suffered from depression, or what he called his ‘black dog’, which, along with his drinking, was exacerbated during these years. All of

this is not to suggest that Churchill was inactive during the 1930s. Far from it. In some respects they were incredibly productive years, particularly from the perspective of his writing. Churchill wrote continuously throughout his adult life after he had acquired the habit during his time in India and Africa in the late 1890s. For instance, in the early 1920s he had begun work on what eventually became a six volume study of the lead up to, course of and aftermath of the First World War, which he published as The World Crisis. Having finished this with the publication of

the final volume in 1931 he embarked on what was arguably his greatest work, a four volume study of the life and times of his ancestor John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. Although Churchill conceived it as an unabashed tribute to Marlborough and his accomplishments, the study, which ran to four large volumes of approximately 200,000 words each, was very well received, providing not just an account of John Churchill’s life, but of the politics of Britain and Europe in the time of King Louis XIV of France and the War of the Spanish Succession. The American political philosopher Leo

Strauss deemed it to be the greatest historical work written during the twentieth century. Today it reads better than most other works of historical prose written in the first half of the twentieth century and above all it captures Marlborough’s significance as a political and military figure. His victory over the French at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704 was a defining moment in Britain’s checking of French growth under Louis XIV and paved the way for Britain to begin eclipsing France as the pre-eminent European power in the course of the eighteenth century. Churchill’s text captures the significance of

all of this like few other works written on Marlborough and his times. Beyond his study and back in parliament Churchill was a passionate voice on another product of Britain’s eighteenth-century expansion, the position of India. For years debate had been raging on what would happen to the British Raj or Crown Rule, with calls for independence impossible to ignore completely by the 1930s. There appeared to be three options: either a form of devolved government, or becoming a dominion like Australia and New Zealand, or perhaps complete independence would be granted. In the early 1930s both Labour and the

Conservatives largely agreed on the idea that India should be granted Dominion status, a legal position which would effectively make India self-governing on a wide range of internal matters, but would ensure that it remained nominally under the jurisdiction of the British Empire. Most importantly, London would still determine India’s foreign policy and military affairs. This arrangement, though, was anathema for Churchill, who became even more trenchantly imperialist and monarchical in his political ideology as he grew older. He was especially disdainful of the principal Indian independence leader, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Indian National Congress which he led. Part of

this was also owing to Churchill’s perception of many subject peoples as being less evolved than the British. To his mind India was not ready socially, culturally or politically to govern itself and he strongly argued throughout the 1930s that, quote, If India could look after herself we would be delighted. Unsurprisingly, when the India Bill came before parliament in December 1934 and proposed a great amount of self-governance for India, he voted against the act, which ultimately though would pass. Churchill’s vocal opposition to self-government for India and his criticisms of Gandhi in particular might well have had a

bearing on matters closer to home. In the early 1930s Churchill also began sounding the alarm concerning the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany. Hitler became chancellor of Germany in the first weeks of 1933 and the Nazis quickly turned the country into a one-party state. As early as April 1933 Churchill gave a speech in the British House of Commons in which he spoke about what he called the odious conditions in Germany. As the months went by and the Nazis began rearming Germany in violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles

which had brought the First World War to an end, Churchill lambasted government policy which was failing to recognise the threat posed by a re-vitalised German military. He was especially critical of the failure to create a new modern, well-appointed British air-force and the rapidity with which the German Luftwaffe overtook the British RAF from 1935 onwards. Yet Churchill’s warning calls were ignored in some circles in part because he had lost credibility amongst a significant number of MPs owing to his virulent objections to Indian self-government and the manner in which he had launched scathing attacks against Gandhi’s character.

Perhaps, many wondered, Churchill’s critique of Hitler and the Nazis was similarly misinformed. Churchill would continue to warn the British political establishment of the dangers of the Nazis into the mid-1930s and beyond. Despite this, many failed to see the danger. This should perhaps be seen in context. The 1930s was a time of extremist politics. Italy had been controlled by Benito Mussolini and his fascists since the early 1920s and a vicious civil war would soon grip Spain. For many within the political sphere in Britain Hitler and the Nazis were not viewed as the primary threat within this

political landscape. Rather the greater threat seemed to be posed by the Soviet Union and its authoritarian leader, Joseph Stalin. The fear was that if Moscow-aligned Communist movements emerged and seized power in a number of Central and Western European nations then Russia would soon be in a position to dominate the continent. Viewed from this perspective the Nazis were the lesser of two evils and certainly a bulwark against the rise of radical socialism. Indeed in 1936 Churchill’s old ally in government during the First World War, David Lloyd George, visited Germany, met Hitler and reported back enthusiastically on

what the Germans were doing to rebuild their country following the shock of the Great Depression. It was for these reasons that many people either did not see the threat posed by the Nazis in the same way which Churchill did in the 1930s or else refused to see it. This was not for the want of trying on the former Chancellor of the Exchequer’s part. In an effort to bring greater awareness to the issue he even aligned himself in the mid-1930s with the Anti-Nazi Council, a British political organisation which had arisen out of the left-wing movement in

England. In order to work alongside them Churchill toned down his opposition to the Soviet Union. Within the Council, a Focus Group consisting of virulent opponents of the Nazis and the British manifestation of fascism, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, emerged which included figures such as Austen Chamberlain, the half-brother of Neville Chamberlain who succeeded Stanley Baldwin as leader of the Conservatives and became Prime Minister in 1937, and other Conservative politicians such as Robert Boothby and Henry Page Croft. Collectively they organised rallies and meetings which sought to draw attention to the risks of appeasing Germany, while it

also worked with members of the civil service and intelligence services to produce concrete evidence of how extensive the German rearmament programme was. Despite these efforts in the mid-1930s the message of Churchill and his allies seemed to be falling on completely deaf ears. There were distractions within British politics, not the least of which was the crisis which followed from the accession of King Edward VIII as the new monarch in January 1936. Edward was determined to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee who was unacceptable to British social norms by the standards of the 1930s. A constitutional crisis

followed, one which was only resolved at the end of that year when Edward abdicated in favour of his younger brother who became King George VI. The upshot of the Abdication Crisis was that the issue of German rearmament and the increasingly jingoistic attitude of Hitler and the Nazis towards their neighbours were largely shelved throughout 1936. Moreover, unbeknownst to the political establishment a further setback occurred in the early summer of 1937 when Stanley Baldwin retired from political life and was succeeded as Prime Minister by Neville Chamberlain. Over the next year and a half Chamberlain would oversee what

in retrospect might be viewed as one of the most profoundly misinformed policies of appeasement in human history. Churchill would be his most vocal critic throughout. At the heart of the matter in the late 1930s was the increasing speed with which Nazi Germany was seeking to realise its ambitions. The goal of Hitler and the Nazis had always been to strengthen Germany’s economy, rearm the nation and begin a new pan-European war in which they would have revenge for the humiliation that had been imposed on the German people at the end of the First World War. Initially Hitler

and his accomplices had believed they would need to wait until 1941 or 1942 before initiating such a conflict, but by 1938, faced with the seeming indifference of the British and French political establishments to their rearmament, Hitler decided to speed the process up. Thus, in March 1938 diplomatic and military pressure was poured on Austria to force the country into accepting a political union with Germany. When a Greater Germany was declared and Nazi flags started flying in Vienna Churchill made a speech before the House of Commons in England in which he declared that the gravity of the

situation could not be underestimated. Still, few people were willing to accept his warnings at face value. Once Austria was annexed Hitler immediately began demanding to take control of the Sudetenland, an extensive part of western Czechoslovakia which had a primarily ethnically German population. By the autumn of 1938 the German military was mobilising to invade Czechoslovakia if the European powers did not give in to Germany’s demands. Churchill was adamant that Britain could not allow this to stand and indeed he visited Neville Chamberlain at No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the British Prime Minister, to put

on record his belief that Britain should declare war on Germany if the Nazis violated Czechoslovak sovereignty. At least a hard line needed to be taken in negotiations with Hitler. But Chamberlain did not heed his advice. Instead, just a few days later, he flew to Munich in southern Germany for a conference with Hitler and the other major heads of state. There, on the 30th of September 1938, Chamberlain signed up to the Munich Agreement, a diplomatic arrangement which gifted the Sudetenland to the Nazis in return for a promise that no further land claims would be made by

Berlin. Back at home Churchill was appalled as the policy of appeasement reached its peak. He described Munich, a total and unmitigated defeat. Events soon proved Churchill right and Chamberlain wrong. In March 1939 Hitler and the Nazis breached the terms of the Munich Agreement when they dismembered the rest of Czechoslovakia, annexing portions of it and creating a vassal state out of what remained. Within days Berlin was making it clear that Poland was its next target. With it now seemingly inevitable that war was to follow before long, Britain and France belatedly accelerated their rearmament programmes. Meanwhile, back

in England Churchill’s political popularity was growing anew as MPs and the general public came to appreciate that he had been right all along in the warnings he had made since 1933 about the Nazis. There was consequently a growing swell of support for Churchill to be brought into the government by Chamberlain. Eventually Chamberlain consented, but not before the Second World War commenced. The outbreak of the conflict was triggered by Germany’s invasion of Poland on the 1st of September 1939. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany in response. That same day Chamberlain appointed Churchill

as the new First Lord of the Admiralty, the position he had held a quarter of a century earlier and ignominiously vacated after the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign. It was the beginning of his rapid ascent to Britain’s wartime leader. Churchill would oversee the Royal Navy for the first eight months of the war. This period is often known as the Phoney War as there was only limited military activity on the Western Front. Germany quickly overran and occupied Poland in September and October 1939, but thereafter the war settled into a period of inertia as neither side made any major

strategic moves in the winter of 1939. Unsure of how to proceed, British thoughts turned to the strategic position of Norway which controlled a huge amount of the coastal region of Northern Europe and the North Atlantic. The country was neutral, but many suspected that Hitler and the Nazis would move in the spring to occupy Norway and perhaps Sweden also as a means of gaining control of a number of North Atlantic seaports and securing the huge iron ore deposits of Sweden which in the long run would be crucial to the German war effort. Accordingly, throughout the winter

of 1939 and spring of 1940 Churchill and the Admiralty office were working out strategic plans to either lay down sea mines along the Norwegian coastline or to even occupy a number of key Norwegian ports such as Narvik. Measures were being implemented to realise these plans in the spring of 1940 when the Nazis suddenly ended the relative calm by invading Denmark and taking control of Norway through special operations in which thousands of German paratroopers were airlifted into Norway’s main cities and ports. In response to the German occupation of Norway a combined British, French, Free Polish and

Free Norwegian expeditionary force was dispatched to the North Atlantic in April 1940. It made limited progress and it was this state of affairs which opened up the infamous Norway Debate in the British House of Commons on the 7th of May. The ostensible purpose of the motions under debate was the handling of this campaign, but it quickly evolved into a discussion of the general handling of the war by Neville Chamberlain and his government. In the course of three days of debates it became clear that Chamberlain not only did not have the support of the Labour Party

and the Liberals but had lost the support of a substantial proportion of the Conservative Party. A previous wartime leader, David Lloyd George, provided a particularly damning account of affairs in which he stated that preparations for the army, navy and air-force had all been inadequate, during the course of which Churchill intervened to say whatever deficiencies there were in the Royal Navy were his rather than Chamberlain’s fault. It was a clear sign that Churchill, unlike Chamberlain, was willing to take responsibility for his actions and the handling of affairs. When Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister following the end

of the debate on the 9th of May, Churchill was quickly voted in as the new Prime Minister on the 10th of May. He later stated that he believed that his whole life up to this point had been, quote, a preparation for this hour and for this trial. Churchill had no time to settle into his new position. In the early hours of the 10th of May, the very day he became Prime Minister, the Germans invaded Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Churchill began assembling a cabinet formed on a cross-party basis effectively creating a government of national unity.

Then, on the 13th of May 1940, he delivered his first address to the House of Commons in which he declared, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. This was the first of three speeches he would make in the summer of 1940 which are generally credited with having galvanised the nation’s resolve to fight on against the Nazis. Churchill’s determination to do so was much needed, for there was a substantial sub-section of parliament in the summer of 1940 who believed that Britain needed to negotiate peace terms with the Nazis. This was especially so

once the Germans succeeded in quickly occupying the Low Countries and moved on Paris within weeks of the first invasion in May 1940. By the end of the month the British Expeditionary Force of approximately 300,000 men were trapped in the French port city of Dunkirk. Only the famous naval rescue mission conducted by thousands of small British fishing and merchant vessels managed to rescue victory from the jaws of defeat. Back in Britain, as the troops arrived back in southern England Churchill made the second of his famous speeches in which he stated, we shall never surrender. Churchill needed

to galvanise the nation and parliament. The rapid German conquest of France in the early summer of 1940 had left many in Britain dispirited and believing that a German conquest of Britain was imminent. The nation now stood largely alone against the Nazis and many, including senior members of Churchill’s own party in parliament, believed that they needed to negotiate with the Nazis in order to get the best peace terms possible. It was in this environment that Churchill made perhaps his finest contribution to history. He convinced parliament and the nation through his speeches and actions that the fight

needed to continue. In his third speech he stated clearly of the government that it was, quote, our inflexible resolve to continue the war. This spirit ensured that Britain held out in the dark days of 1940 and as a result the Allies in years to come were in a position to open a Western Front in France. This was not as easily achieved as is often suggested, for throughout the first months of his premiership Churchill was in the unenviable position of having to convince senior members of his own cabinet such as Lord Halifax, that Britain needed to

hold out and not seek peace terms from Hitler. He won the argument and as the Germans began a naval blockade and bombing campaign of Britain from the late summer of 1940 onwards, the British people steeled themselves for the long fight ahead. The war over the next year and a half was tumultuous. Churchill was effectively the sole leader of the resistance to the Nazis for much of it. The Blitz, short for Blitzkrieg meaning ‘lightening War,’ as the German bombing campaign against Britain is known, continued through the winter of 1940 and into 1941, even as Churchill desperately

sought aid from the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt was personally in favour of war against the Nazis, but public sentiment in the US was against intervening in what was deemed to be a European conflict. However, he did negotiate the Lend-Lease Program with Churchill which came into effect in March 1941 and which allowed for the US to provide Britain with extensive support in the form of food, oil and war material, while ostensibly remaining neutral. This was a big break for Churchill’s government, which was soon followed by another fortuitous development. Hitler decided to

effectively end the Blitz and instead turn eastwards to invade the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1941 the Nazis initiated the largest land invasion in human history when three million men invaded the Soviet Union. It went well initially, with the Germans advancing to outside Moscow and Leningrad by the October and November 1940, but then that winter the advance stalled. In December 1941 the strategic situation changed further when Germany’s ally, the Empire of Japan, launched an unprovoked attack on the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. This brought the US into the war and Churchill

now became the leader of one of three major nations, consisting of Britain, the US and the Soviet Union, whose combined might could be brought to bear on the Nazis. In 1942 the war in Europe would continue to focus on the clash between the Germans and the Russians on the Eastern Front, but the entry of Japan into the conflict had created an entirely new theatre of operations for Britain in southern Asia. As well as attacking Pearl Harbour in December 1941 the Japanese had begun advancing on Britain’s colonies in southern Asia, notably towards Singapore and into British

Burma. Singapore fell to the Japanese on the 15th of February 1942. Churchill’s government had made a strategic blunder by concentrating on the naval defence of the city, believing that the land bridge to Singapore from Malaysia was impassable for the Japanese army, a belief that proved entirely incorrect. Churchill stated in the aftermath of the surrender of the garrison that it was the worst defeat the country had suffered in British military history. Thereafter the Japanese began to push further westwards and much of the fighting between the British and Japanese in 1942 and 1943 focused on Burma and

the region around modern-day Bangladesh. Throughout this time Calcutta was even bombed regularly by the Japanese, indicating the extent of Japanese penetration into the British Raj. The Japanese advance was eventually checked on the north-eastern frontier of India and gradually pushed back in the course of 1943, but the need for Indian support had allowed Gandhi to place extensive pressure on the British government in what became known as the Quit India Campaign. This called for an orderly British withdrawal from India after the war in return for Indian support during it. Under pressure from President Roosevelt Churchill was forced

to acquiesce to some of these demands, paving the way for India’s eventual independence in 1947. Churchill’s approach to India as Prime Minister was also extremely controversial owing to the famine which struck Bengal, a major area of the Raj lying along what is now the border between India and Bangladesh. This was and remains one of the most densely populated regions in the entire world. Some sixty million people lived here in the early 1940s. In the course of 1943, a horrific famine struck Bengal, killing somewhere between two and four million people. The exact number is unknown. Millions

more suffered from malnutrition and displacement. While famines of this kind are common during wartime, the Bengal Famine of 1943 is generally understood today as having been largely man-made. The Bengal famine came about after the Japanese occupied Burma and cut off rice imports to the Eastern sub-continent in 1942. Churchill and his war cabinet, fearing a full scale Japanese invasion of India, ordered a scorched earth policy in the region in response to the threat, in which thousands of acres of farmland were seized or even destroyed. Churchill’s government also introduced a number of policies in the course of

1941 and 1942, including mass conscription of farm workers, this combined with a series of natural disasters in 1942, including a Cyclone in the bay of Bengal, further compounded the increasingly wide spread starvation and famine, which culminated in the deaths of upwards of 3 million people in the region, although some say the figure is much higher. Churchill has largely been blamed for perpetuating and even instigating this famine by Indian and progressive historians in recent publications, as by this time his disregard for the country and its freedom seeking populace was no secret. However Churchill’s defenders claim that,

when both he and his war cabinet became fully aware of the scale of the famine on the 24th of September 1943, they diverted a quarter of a million tons of grain to India. They also mention the fact the Japanese invasion of Burma was one of the prime causes of the crisis, along with a lack of shipping due to the war, poor local government, misplaced food allocations and natural disasters. In Churchill’s defence, the focus of the British government did lie elsewhere in 1942 and 1943, primarily North Africa where the Italians and Germans had been seeking to

overrun the British position in Egypt, in the process seizing the Suez Canal and the route into the oil fields of the Middle East. Consequently, what was otherwise a limited regional conflict over a stretch of the Sahara Desert took on a greater significance in 1942. The tide was turned when the British won a major victory of the Second Battle of El Alamein in early November. This combined with the Soviet Union’s impending victory at the Battle of Stalingrad in southern Russia led Churchill to proclaim at a speech he gave in London on the 10th of November 1942

that, This is perhaps, the end of the beginning. He was right. In the first half of 1943 the war turned decidedly against the Nazis and in favour of the Allies. By the end of that spring the British, French and Americans were victorious in North Africa, while the Russians had begun to push the Germans back towards Poland and Ukraine. That summer a long-anticipated second front was opened in Europe when the Western Allies invaded Sicily and then Italy. Churchill’s working methods during the war are noteworthy. Were we to envisage a modern wartime leader of a country we

might imagine them operating out of a government building and an endless succession of meetings with other ministers, generals and advisors in the corridors of power. This was not the case with Churchill. Throughout the war he worked regularly from Downing Street, awaking around 7am but spending several hours in bed reading the newspapers and dictating memos and letters to his secretaries. An alcoholic drink or two followed as he got up and met with a few individuals before a lengthy lunch. Several hours of work followed, but Churchill was then known to regularly go for an evening nap between

about 5 and half past six. This was a habit he had developed in his younger years and one which he claimed made him more productive in the evenings. After the nap, he would have dinner, a few more drinks and several more hours of work would follow, with Churchill often working past midnight in his study. This pattern was regularly interrupted by sudden changes in events, and when Churchill had to travel away from London, but the Prime Minister’s working methods generally followed along these lines when possible. Extraordinary events which called for Churchill to break from this pattern

increased in number in 1944. In the first half of the year the Western Allies began preparing for the opening of a major western front against the Nazis by invading France from Britain. This would be the moment in which Churchill’s success in keeping Britain in the war in 1940 bore its greatest fruit. Such an undertaking by the United States alone across the entire length of the Atlantic Ocean would have been all but impossible but it was entirely feasible from Britain. Churchill was central to the planning process for what eventually became the D-Day landings. He was unusually

anxious throughout, fearing that the landings could end in an Allied bloodbath if poorly planned or if information about the proposed Allied landing sites in northern France was obtained by the Germans. Meanwhile, throughout 1943 and 1944 Churchill also travelled abroad on several occasions to attend summits of the main Allied leaders, at Casablanca in January 1943, Tehran in the final weeks of the year, Quebec in Canada in September 1944, Moscow a month later and finally Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945. These summits, at which Churchill, President Roosevelt of the United States and Joseph Stalin, the head

of the Soviet Union, were the paramount figures, were the key settings at which the post-war world order was effectively decided upon. Each leader had their own personal concerns during these conferences. Roosevelt, for instance, was primarily interested in the issue of defeating Japan once the war in Europe was over. For his part, Churchill’s primary interest lay in Eastern and Southern Europe and the extent to which countries like Greece, Poland and the various Balkan nations would fall under either western or Soviet dominance in the post-war settlement. He clashed with Stalin on the matter and even before the

war ended in Europe the seeds of the Cold War were firmly sown at Yalta. The final months of the war involved one of the most controversial actions undertaken by the Western Allies during its entire duration. Throughout the spring of 1945, as they prepared for the final push on Berlin, the Allies engaged in a massive bombing campaign against Germany’s major cities. Churchill was a firm advocate of what was known as the Area Bombing Directive. This had been first issued in 1942 with the goal of having the British Royal Air Force engage in the systematic bombing of

Germany’s industrial cities with the goal of crippling its domestic economy and war machine. However, in the spring of 1945 this took on a shape which has retrospectively been deemed more vengeful than strategic. The most notorious episode occurred in mid-February 1945 when 1,300 fighter bombers dropped nearly 4,000 tonnes of explosives on the city of Dresden in less than 72 hours. Approximately 25,000 people were killed and the city was reduced to a smouldering ruin by the Allied bombing campaign. Churchill has been criticised for being a strong advocate of this policy, the strategic validity of which was highly

questionable. Nevertheless, by comparison with the actions of the Russians as they advanced through Poland and eastern Germany the Allied onslaught in the west of the country was exponentially more humane. Moreover, there were genuine fears in the spring of 1945 that if a speedy victory was not obtained a guerrilla war would begin in Germany, one which could last years, and some felt at the time that use of extensive area bombing was justified if it would bring the war to a speedier conclusion. Ultimately, no such guerrilla war would ever occur. Once the western front was opened in

Europe in the summer of 1944 the Nazi war effort began to crumble, as Hitler desperately divided his troops between the three different fronts which were now in existence. By early 1945, despite a counterattack by the Germans in the Ardennes Forest in December 1944, the Allies began entering Germany from both the west and the east. By now Churchill’s focus had switched to the issues of setting up a new United Nations, an international body which would succeed the interwar League of Nations and hopefully prove more successful, and the vexed issue of the position of countries like Poland

and Hungary in the post-war settlement. These were still being debated as the Russians encircled Berlin in the late spring and began the final siege of the city. The western Allies were spreading out across western and southern Germany at the same time, mopping up resistance in the hopes of bringing the war to a swift end. That is what occurred. Hitler killed himself in Berlin on the 30th of April 1945 and just over a week later the Germans surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. The war in the Pacific would drag on for four months, but when America dropped

two nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the fighting abruptly came to an end. The Second World War was over. With the war over Churchill quickly called a general election in Britain which was held on the 5th of July 1945. Churchill could have expected a landslide victory for the Conservatives in the immediate aftermath of the war, such was the popularity and efficacy of his wartime leadership. But this was not to be. Back in 1942 a British civil servant and academic called William Beveridge had drawn up a report outlining a way in which

British society could be structured in the post-war period so as to avoid the species of social and political extremism developing in Britain which had ravaged the continent in the 1930s and led to the war. He outlined a comprehensive scheme for a system of national insurance, whereby British citizens would pay into a common fund of money to provide services such as a National Health Service, unemployment benefits to those who ended up out of work, illness payments to those who could not work and numerous other services besides. In the 1945 election the Labour Party led by Clement

Attlee campaigned on the basis that they would implement the Beveridge Report if they were in government. The British people were in favour of this and Labour won a landslide victory in the election. Churchill, who had a legitimate case for feeling hard done by with this rejection of him as Prime Minister at the end of the war, would now step down as Prime Minister and return to the opposition benches. Out of office Churchill dedicated himself to warning about the threat which was now posed by the Soviet Union. Despite the arrangements which had been reached at summits

such as those at Tehran and Yalta in the closing years of the conflict, the end of the Second World War in Europe effectively saw the Soviet Union and the western Allies imposing control over whichever territory their forces happened to have occupied in the final year of the war. Thus, despite agreements to the contrary, Poland and Hungary were very quickly subsumed into the Soviet bloc, with Communist regimes imposed. In the Balkans the partisan leader who had led much of the resistance to Nazi occupation during the war, Josip Tito, established the new state of Yugoslavia along Communist

lines, though he would soon diverge from Moscow’s oversight. However, the United States, Britain and the other western Allies managed to keep Greece and Turkey within their sphere of influence in the mid-1940s, largely through massive funding provided by the new US president, Harry Truman’s administration. Austria remained a point of contention, with Soviet, British and American troops stationed here for a decade after the war and there was a real risk for a time that the country would become divided into pro-Soviet and pro-western blocs along the same lines which Germany eventually was. Churchill was one of the first

statesmen to grasp the full significance of what was occurring in Europe and more broadly in terms of the global balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States. During a three month tour of the US in early 1946 he gave a famous speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri concerning the growing Cold War between the Soviet Union and the western world led by the US. Here he famously declared, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. In this new environment Churchill called for ever growing co-operation between the western states to fend off further

Soviet expansion and noted in particular the ‘special relationship’ between the US and Britain with their shared language and cultural heritage. His perception of the new political landscape of Europe found formal expression in the years that followed as the Soviet formed Eastern Europe into the Warsaw Pact, while the western allies coalesced into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation or NATO, as it is more commonly known. More broadly, while Churchill was not the first to use the term ‘Iron Curtain’ regarding the Soviet dominance of much of Europe, the phrase having been used by the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph

Goebbels, in the last months of the Second World War, he did popularise it and make it a part of the wider Cold War terminology. Despite being out of power in Britain in the second half of the 1940s Churchill continued to play a significant role in British politics as leader of the opposition. He continued to oppose India’s independence, though it was granted in 1947. He correctly assumed that independence would lead to bitter divisions along both religious and social lines and that a swift, disorderly creation of an independent Indian state would result in problems. His views on

the Republic of Ireland were enlightened. He was vehemently opposed to the partition of the island and advocated in favour of the north of the country being joined to the Republic, albeit in a peaceful fashion. Had his words been heeded the bitter civil war which broke out in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and which lasted for thirty years might have been avoided. In an address to the University of Zurich in 1947, Churchill urged Europeans to turn their backs on the horrors of the past, and create a ‘European family’ of justice, mercy and freedom, perhaps even building

a ‘United States of Europe.’ He was an early advocate of British entry into the European Coal and Steel Community which was proposed in 1950 and established in 1951 with the goal of fostering free trade between France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. It would ultimately take over twenty years for Britain to realise it was falling hopelessly behind its neighbours in Western Europe economically before Britain joined what was by then the European Economic Community. There was an Indian summer for Churchill politically. Despite failing to reclaim power from the Labour Party in the 1950 general election

Churchill retained the confidence of the Conservative Party as their leader. In any event, Labour had only won a bare majority of five seats in the election and their leader Clement Attlee decided to call a new snap election in 1951 with the hope of winning a bigger majority. His calculation was wrong and instead the Conservatives increased their seat total by 23, giving Churchill a workable majority with which he could form a new government. Thus, over six years after vacating the post, Churchill returned as Prime Minister just shy of his 77th birthday. He was largely concerned with

foreign affairs himself and for a time held the portfolio of Minister for Defence. On the domestic front the main concerns were with house building and a normalisation of society as spectres of the war such as rationing, which continued right up to the end of the 1940s, came to an end. Churchill was aided in all of this by his near successor, Harold Macmillan, as Minister for Housing and Local Government. In 1953 Churchill received an honour which is often overlooked in studies of his life. That year the Nobel Foundation in Sweden awarded Churchill with the Nobel Prize

for Literature in recognition of, quote, his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values. By any reckoning Churchill’s published output was formidable by this point. His main works of historical analysis were his multi-volume biography of John Marlborough, a six volume study of the First World War and a six volume study of the Second World War, the final volume of which appeared in 1953 as he was being awarded the Nobel Prize. In addition to these he published many other single volume histories on various subjects and several memoirs

of his own journeys through Africa. Dozens of volumes of his speeches were also compiled over the years, edited to some extent by his son Randolph. Churchill could not attend the ceremony in Stockholm to receive the award in person in 1953, but he was particularly proud of the fact that he had received it for his literary activity independent of his political career. He continued to write thereafter and his four volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published between 1956 and 1958 is broadly speaking considered one of his most accomplished historical studies, one which is still well

regarded today. Ultimately, Churchill would not be able to see out his term as Prime Minister. Even by the time he entered 10 Downing Street in the early winter of 1951 his health was declining. It was informally accepted by a wide range of senior Conservative politicians that he would only serve for a year or two before handing over the reins to his designated successor as leader of the party, Anthony Eden. However, Eden had health problems of his own and Churchill was markedly reluctant as 1952 turned into 1953 to actually relinquish power. Eventually, though, his own declining

strength made the decision for him. In June 1953 Churchill suffered a stroke which left him with temporary paralysis on one side of his body. He was forced as a result to recuperate at his home in Chartwell for the next six months but declined to resign as Prime Minister. Details of his deteriorating health were kept from the British public. Though he recovered significantly in 1954 he accepted the inevitable in 1955 and resigned as Prime Minister in April of that year, at which time he was granted a knighthood, refusing the loftier honour of becoming Duke of London,

which Queen Elizabeth II had offered him. Despite being 80 years of age he did not retire fully and continued to hold a seat in parliament down to the 1960s where he was recognised as Father of the House, the honorary title bestowed at Westminster on the longest-serving member of the House of Commons. In semi-retirement Churchill played a limited role in front-line politics, spending much of his time at Chartwell in Kent and limiting his participation in the House of Commons. Nevertheless, he continued to comment in private on major political events. He was scathing of his successor Eden’s

handling of the Suez Crisis of 1956 following the Egyptian President, Gamal Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in which Britain was a major stakeholder. During it Israel, Britain and France collectively invaded Egypt, but were forced to back down under pressure from the Soviet Union, the US and the United Nations. Churchill also bemoaned the loss of Britain’s empire as it began granting independence to dozens of states from the late 1950s onwards. Privately he spent much of his time in later years finishing some of his written works and painting at Chartwell, while he and his wife Clementine

also travelled when they could, spending time along the French Riviera and in the United States. Churchill began to suffer a series of mounting health problems in the early 1960s. For instance, while vacationing in Monte Carlo in 1962 he fell and broke his hip. An awareness of his impending death saw President John F. Kennedy proclaim Churchill an honorary American citizen in 1963 and the following summer the House of Commons in the UK passed a special resolution thanking Churchill for his years of service as he elected not to stand for election as an MP again. By that

time, he had sat in parliament for 64 years, only losing his position during that time for a brief two year period in the early 1920s. He suffered another stroke on the 10th of January 1965 and died two weeks later on the 24th of January at 90 years of age. In recognition of his wide-ranging career, wartime leadership and the significance of his public service, Churchill was given a state funeral, the first time an individual who was not a member of the royal family had been afforded the honour in Britain since 1898 when another former Prime Minister,

William Gladstone, was given a state funeral. His coffin lay in state at Westminster for three days before the funeral was held at St Paul’s Cathedral in central London. The ceremony was unusual for a former Prime Minister in that it was attended by Queen Elizabeth II. Afterwards Churchill’s body was conveyed by boat down the River Thames and sent to Oxfordshire where he was buried near his family’s ancestral seat at Blenheim Palace. Some months later a memorial stone was placed near the tomb of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster to recognise Churchill’s death and its coinciding with the

25th anniversary of the Battle of Britain when Churchill led the resistance to Nazi Germany. Winston Churchill was one of the most significant political figures of the twentieth century. He is rightly primarily remembered for his leadership of Britain during the darkest days of the Second World War when Britain alone amongst the great powers stood against Nazi Germany. However, his life involved so much else besides. In his earliest days he was present in Sudan during the final stages of the British conquest of the region and then served in South Africa during the Second Boer War. As a

member of parliament back in Britain in the 1900s and 1910s he was involved in the foremost political debates of the day, whether concerning the Suffragette movement and free trade issue at home or the Irish and India questions in terms of Britain’s empire. During the First World War he was in charge of the Royal Navy for a time and controversially was responsible for initiating the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign. Given the colourful nature of his wider life one could be forgiven for forgetting that Churchill also ran the British economy as Chancellor of the Exchequer during much of the

1920s, while a great many people who are familiar with his speeches delivered in the summer of 1940 are completely unfamiliar with Churchill’s enormous literary output and work as an historian, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1953. Finally, in the aftermath of the Second World War he played a major role in the post-war reconstruction of Britain and the inception of the Cold War. However, while no serious assessment of Churchill’s life can doubt his significance to the history of the twentieth century, there is less consensus when evaluating his legacy. Churchill was unquestionably a staunch imperialist

and his views in this regard could be seen to put him on the wrong side of history when it came to issues such as the use of paramilitary forces in Ireland during the war of independence, the proposed use of chemical weapons in the Middle East in the early 1920s and his attitudes towards the Indian independence movement. Some also claim that Churchill was a war monger and placed his own personal ambitions above the needs of his country, whilst others state that in India he was responsible for war crimes, particularly in regards to the Bengal Famine. All

of these issues stand against Churchill. But there is also much to commend him to history. On many issues his views were surprisingly modern, not least his advocacy of free trade, his eventual support for the Suffragist movement and his desire for Ireland not to be partitioned between a republican south and a unionist north. He was wholly correct in his perception of the threats posed by the rise of Hitler in the 1930s and the coming Cold War in 1945. Other aspects of his legacy are often completely overlooked, not least his abilities as an historian and a writer

and also his call for both the Boers and the Germans to be treated in a conciliatory fashion after the Second Boer War and the First World War. But it was his role as Britain’s wartime leader in the dark days of 1940 which is unquestionably his greatest legacy. Had Churchill not convinced parliament and the nation in 1940 that Britain needed to continue the struggle against Germany the map of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century would have looked very different. Without the Western Allies advancing from Britain into France and western Germany the Soviets would

most likely have occupied the rest of the continent after they defeated Germany and so the complexion of Europe’s politics and the Cold War would have been completely different had it not been for Churchill’s leadership. In that sense, much like his ancestor and hero, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, Winston Churchill changed the course of European history. Ultimately the legacy of sir Winston Churchill must be that he more than any other human being, saved Europe and possibly the entire world from the horrific dictatorships of either Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, whose crimes were a thousand fold

worse and more sinister than anything that occurred under the British Empire. His supporters argue that for this alone, he should always be regarded as an international hero to all those who hold freedom dear and it is impossible to argue that the world is a better place for the life of Winston Churchill, Britain’s greatest prime minister. What do you think of Winston Churchill? Was he Britain’s greatest Prime Minister, or do some of his failings at other times, such as the Gallipoli Campaign and other mistakes and flaws mitigate against such a contention? Please let us know in

the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.