Winston Churchill

Biography

Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace in 1874 into an aristocratic family. He trained at Sandhurst and was commissioned into the 4th Queen's Own Hussars in 1895. As a soldier and war correspondent he saw action on the North-West Frontier of India, in the Sudan and in the Second Boer War, where his capture and escape made him well known.

He entered the House of Commons as a Conservative in 1900, crossed to the Liberals in 1904 and held a series of cabinet posts under Asquith, including Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty. The failure of the Gallipoli campaign forced him out of the Admiralty in 1915, and he served for some months on the Western Front. He returned to government under Lloyd George and, after rejoining the Conservatives, was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929.

Out of office in the 1930s, he warned against German rearmament and opposed appeasement. He went back to the Admiralty when war began in 1939 and became Prime Minister in May 1940. He led Britain through the Second World War, built the alliance with the United States and the Soviet Union, and met Roosevelt and Stalin at Tehran and Yalta.

Defeated in the 1945 election, he led the opposition and warned of an "iron curtain" across Europe. He was Prime Minister again from 1951 to 1955, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his historical writing, and stayed an MP until 1964. He died in 1965 and received a state funeral.