General Notes

Winston Churchill, born 30 Nov 1874 at Blenheim Palace, where his parents were guests of his Uncle, was the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill and the American heiress Jennie Jerome (1854-1921). He graduated from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst into the 11th Hussars, but having served in India and the Sudan, he resigned his cavalry commission in 1899 to become a correspondent during the Boer War. A daring escape after he had been captured made him a national hero, and in 1900 he was elected to Parliament as a Conservative. Despite his aristocratic background, he switched in 1904 to the Liberal party. In 1908, he became President of the Board of Trade in Herbert Henry Asquith's Liberal cabinet. Then, and later as Home Secretary (1910-11), he worked for special reform in tandem with David Lloyd George. As First Lord of the Admiralty (1911-15), Churchill was a vigorous modernizer of the Royal Navy. He married an American heiress, had one son (Randolph Churchill MP) and three three daughters. Churchill's role in World War I was controversial and almost destroyed his career. Naval problems and his support of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign forced his resignation from the Admiralty. Following service as a battalion commander in the Royal Highland Fusiliers in France, he joined Lloyd George's coalition Cabinet, and from 1917 to 1922 he filled several important positions, including Minister of Munitions and Secretary for War. The collapse of Lloyd George and the Liberal party in 1922, left Churchill out of Parliament between 1922 and 1924. Returning in 1924, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin's Conservative government (1924-29). As such he displayed his new conservatism by returning Britain
to the gold standard and vigorously condemning the trade unions during the General Strike of 1926. During the depression years (1929-39) Churchill was denied cabinet office. Baldwin and later Neville Chamberlain, who dominated the National Government from 1931 to 1940, disliked his opposition to self-government
for India and his support of Edward VIII during the abdication crisis of 1936. His insistence on the need for rearmament and his censure of  Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938 also aroused suspicion. When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, however, Churchill's views were finally appreciated, and public opinion demanded his return to the Admiralty. The signal went out to the the Fleet - "Winston's back".
Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister on 10 May 1940. During the dark days of World War II that followed the ecacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk, the fall of France, and the blitz, Churchill's pugnacity and rousing speeches rallied the British to continue the fight. He urged his compatriots to conduct themselves so that, "if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, æThis was their finest hour.'" By successful collaboration with President Franklin D. Roosevelt he was able to secure military aid and moral support from the United States. After the Soviet Union and the USA entered the war in 1941,
Churchill established close ties with leaders of what he called the "Grand Alliance". Traveling ceaselessly throughout the war, he did much to coordinate military strategy and to ensure Hitler's defeat. His conferences with Roosevelt and Stalin, most notably at Yalta in 1945, also shaped the map of postwar Europe. By 1945 he was admired throughout the world, his reputation disguising the fact that Britain's military role had become secondary. Unappreciative of the popular demands for postwar social change, however, Churchill was defeated by the Labour Party in the election of 1945. Churchill criticized the Welfare State reforms of Labour under his wartime deputy and successor as Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. He also warned in his "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, of the dangers of
Soviet expansion. He was Prime Minister again from 1951 to 1955, but this time age and poor health prevented him from providing dynamic leadership. Resigning in 1955, Churchill devoted his last years to painting and writing. He died on 24 Jan 1965, at the age of 90. Following a state funeral, he was buried at Bladon near Blenheim Palace. Churchill was also an able historian. His most famous works are "The World Crisis" (4 vols, 1923-29), "My Early Life" (1930), "Marlborough" (4 vols, 1933-38), "The Second World War" (6 vols, 1948-53), and "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples" (4 vols, 1956-58). He received the Nobel Prize
for literature and a knighthood in 1953. Churchill's death in 1965, like that of Queen Victoria in 1901, marked the end of an era in British history. Born into a Victorian aristocratic family, he witnessed and participated in Britain's transformation from empire to welfare state, and its decline as a world power. His true importance,
however, rests on the fact that by sheer stubborn courage he led the British people, and with them, the democratic Western world, from the brink of defeat to a final victory in the greatest conflict the world has ever seen.

{Burke's Peerage and Chamber's Biographical Dictionary}