Winston Churchill(1874–1965)

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire on 30 November 1874, into the ducal Churchill line of Marlborough. He trained at Sandhurst, served as a cavalry officer and war correspondent in India, the Sudan and South Africa, and entered Parliament in 1900. Over the next four decades he held nearly every senior office of state, including the Admiralty, the Exchequer and the Home Department.

On 10 May 1940, at the gravest hour of the Second World War, he became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. In the months that followed he refused a negotiated peace and rallied a nation that, for a time, stood alone. His broadcasts and Commons speeches of 1940, the promise to fight on the beaches and the salute to the few, became the spoken record of British resolve and are quoted to this day.

He led the wartime coalition to victory in Europe by May 1945, working in close alliance with the United States and the Commonwealth and shaping the grand strategy of the war from the Atlantic Charter onward. Returned to office as Prime Minister from 1951 to 1955, he steered the country through the early post-war recovery and the opening of the nuclear age before retiring from the premiership at eighty.

He was also one of the most widely read historians of his century. His six-volume The Second World War and the four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, and he was knighted in the same year. In 1963 the United States Congress made him an honorary citizen, an honour granted to almost no one else.

The Churchill name, from the Old English for the hill by the church, had belonged to a great military house since Marlborough. Winston Churchill carried it into the front rank of the twentieth century and made it, for much of the world, a byword for standing firm.