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Biography Sir Wiston Churchill



Partes: 1, 2

  1. Early
    life of Winston Churchill
  2. The
    Army
  3. Churchill in Parliament
  4. Ministerial office
  5. Churchill's Return to power
  6. Career
    between the wars
  7. Role
    as wartime Prime Minister
  8. After
    World War II
  9. Second
    term
  10. The
    Mau Mau Rebellion
  11. Malayan Emergency
  12. Honours
  13. Family and Personal Life
  14. References

Monografias.com

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, (30
November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British politician
and author, best known as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
during the Second World War. At various times a soldier, author
and politician, Churchill is generally regarded as one of the
most important leaders in modern British and world history. He
won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Churchill's legal surname was
Spencer-Churchill (he was related to the Spencer family), but
starting with his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, his branch of
the family used the name Churchill in his public
life.Contents

Early life of
Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill was a descendant of the
first famous member of the Churchill family, John Churchill, 1st
Duke of Marlborough. Winston's politician father, Lord Randolph
Churchill, was the third son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough;
Winston's mother was Lady Randolph Churchill (née Jennie
Jerome), daughter of American millionaire Leonard
Jerome.

Winston Churchill was born in Blenheim
Palace in Woodstock, Oxfordshire; he arrived unexpectedly early
when his mother was attending a ball and was born in the ladies'
room. As was typical for upper-class boys at that time, he spent
much of his childhood at boarding schools. He sat the entrance
exam for Harrow School, but, famously, on confronting the Latin
paper, carefully wrote the title, his name, and the number 1
followed by a dot, and could not think of anything else to write.
He was accepted despite this, but placed in the bottom division
where they were primarily taught English, at which he excelled.
Today, this famous ancient public school offers an annual
Churchill essay-prize on a subject chosen by the head of the
English department.

He was rarely visited by his mother (then
known as Lady Randolph), whom he virtually worshipped, despite
his letters begging her to either come or let his father permit
him to come home. In later years, after Winston reached
adulthood, he and his mother became closer, developing a kinship
almost more like a brother and a sister than son and mother,
coupled by a strong friendship.

He followed his father's career keenly but
had a distant relationship with him. Once, in 1886, he is
reported to have proclaimed "My daddy is Chancellor of the
Exchequer and one day that's what I'm going to be." His desolate,
lonely childhood stayed with him throughout his life. On the
other hand, as a child he was very close to his nurse, Elizabeth
Anne Everest (who would be known now as a nanny), and was deeply
saddened when she died on 3 July 1895. He paid for her gravestone
at the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium.

Churchill did badly at Harrow, regularly
being punished for poor work and lack of effort. His nature was
independent and rebellious and he failed to achieve much
academically, failing some of the same courses numerous times and
refusing to study the classics (that is, Latin and Ancient
Greek). Despite this, he showed great ability in other areas such
as history, in which he was sometimes top of his class. The view
of Churchill as a failure at school is one which he himself
propagated, probably due to his father's disappointment regarding
the young Winston and his obvious readiness to label his son as
such. He did, however, become the school's fencing
champion.

The
Army

Churchill attended the Royal Military
Academy Sandhurst. Upon his graduation at age 20, Churchill
joined the army as a Subaltern of the IV (Queen's Own) Hussars
Cavalry regiment. This regiment was stationed in Bangalore,
India. On arriving in India, Churchill dislocated his shoulder
while reaching from his boat for a chain on the dock and being
thrown against the quay. This shoulder gave him trouble in later
years, occasionally dislocating from its socket.

In India the main occupation of Churchill's
regiment was polo, a situation which did not appeal to the young
man, hungry for more military action. He devoted his time to
educating himself from books which he had sent out. The Bangalore
Club, of which he was a member, has records (which they display
to visitors) showing that Winston Churchill failed to pay dues of
13 rupees, due to 'financial penury', a debt they believe to be
still outstanding. [1]

While stationed in India, he began to seek
out wars. In 1895 he and Reggie Barnes obtained leave to travel
to Cuba to observe the Spanish battles against Cuban guerrillas.
Churchill also obtained a commission to write about the conflict
from the Daily Graphic newspaper. To Churchill's delight he came
under fire for the first time on his twenty-first birthday. On
his way to Cuba he also made his first visit to the United
States, being introduced to New York society by one of his
mother's lovers, Bourke Cockran. In 1897 Churchill attempted to
travel to the Greco-Turkish War but this conflict effectively
ended before he could arrive. He therefore continued on to
England on leave before hearing of the Pathan revolt on the North
West Frontier and rushing back to India to participate in the
campaign to put it down.

Churchill had previously obtained a promise
from Sir Bindon Blood, the commander of this expedition, that if
he were to command again Churchill could accompany him. He wasted
no time in reminding Blood of his promise and was able to
participate in the six-week campaign, also writing articles for
the newspapers The Pioneer and The Daily Telegraph at £5 an
article. By October 1897 Churchill was back in Britain and his
first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, on that
campaign, was published in December.

While still officially stationed in India,
and having obtained a long period of leave, Churchill attempted
to get himself assigned to the army being put together and
commanded by Lord Kitchener and intended to achieve the
reconquest of the Sudan. Kitchener was opposed to having
Churchill on the staff, feeling he should be back with his
regiment in India, but Churchill pulled a great many strings to
get his presence approved—even arranging for a telegram to
Kitchener from the Prime Minister the Marquess of Salisbury. In
the end, Churchill was able to attend the war after obtaining a
posting to the 21st Lancers—a force whose composition was
chosen by the War Office, not Kitchener. He also served as a war
correspondent for the Morning Post, at a rate of £15 per
column. While in the Sudan, Churchill participated in what has
been described as the last meaningful British cavalry charge at
the battle of Omdurman. By October 1898 he had returned to
Britain and begun work on the two-volume The River War, published
the following year.

In 1899 Churchill left the army and decided
upon a parliamentary career. He stood as a Conservative candidate
in Oldham constituency in a by-election of that year. He came in
third (Oldham was at that time a two-seat borough), failing to be
elected.

On 12 October 1899 the second Anglo-Boer
war between Britain and Afrikaners broke out in South Africa.
Churchill set off as a war correspondent for the Morning Post,
receiving £250 a month for four months. Once in South
Africa he accepted a lift on a British Army Armoured Train under
the command of Aylmer Haldane; this train was thrown off the
tracks by a Boer ambush and explosion. Churchill, though not
officially a combatant, took charge of operations to get the
track cleared and managed to ensure that the engine and half the
train, carrying the wounded, could escape. Churchill, however,
was not so lucky and, together with other officers and soldiers
was captured and held in a POW camp in Pretoria, despite doubt
about his combatant status.

Churchill managed to escape from his prison
camp, resulting in a long-running criticism and controversy as it
was claimed that he did not wait for Haldane and another man who
had planned the escape, but who were unable, or unwilling, to
risk slipping over the fence when Churchill did. Once outside the
Pretoria prison camp Churchill travelled almost 300 miles (480
km) to Portuguese Lourenço Marques in Delagoa Bay. He
achieved this due to the assistance of an English mine manager
who hid him down his mine and smuggled him onto a train headed
out of Boer territory. His escape made him a minor national hero
for a time in Britain, though instead of returning home he took
ship to Durban and rejoined General Redvers Buller's army on its
march to relieve Ladysmith and take Pretoria. This time, although
continuing as a war correspondent, Churchill gained a commission
in the South African Light Horse Regiment. He fought at Spion Kop
and was one of the first British troops into Ladysmith and
Pretoria; in fact, he and the Duke of Marlborough, his cousin,
were able to get ahead of the rest of the troops in Pretoria,
where they demanded and received the surrender of 52 Boer guards
of the prison camp there.

Churchill's two books on the Boer war,
London to Ladysmith via Pretoria and Ian Hamilton's March, were
published in May and October 1900 respectively.

Churchill in
Parliament

After returning from South Africa,
Churchill again stood as a Conservative party candidate in
Oldham, this time in the 1900 general election, or Khaki
election.

He was duly elected, but rather than
attending the opening of Parliament, he embarked on a speaking
tour throughout the United Kingdom and the United States, by
means of which he raised ten thousand pounds for himself.
(Members of Parliament were unpaid in those days and Churchill
was not rich by the standards of the time.) While in the United
States, one of his speeches was introduced by Mark Twain, and he
dined with the New York Governor and Vice-President Theodore
Roosevelt.

In February 1901 Churchill arrived back in
the United Kingdom to enter Parliament, and became associated
with a group of Tory dissidents led by Lord Hugh Cecil and
referred to as the Hughligans, a play on "Hooligans". During his
first parliamentary session Churchill provoked controversy by
opposing the government's army estimates, arguing against
extravagant military expenditure. By 1903 he was drawing away
from Lord Hugh's views. He also opposed the Liberal Unionist
leader Joseph Chamberlain whose party was in coalition with the
Conservatives. Chamberlain proposed extensive tariff reforms
intended to protect the economic pre-eminence of Britain behind
tariff barriers. This earned him the detestation of his own
supporters — indeed, Conservative backbenchers staged a
walkout once while he was speaking. His own constituency
effectively deselected him, although he continued to sit for
Oldham until the next general election.

In 1904 Churchill's dissatisfaction with
the Conservatives and the appeal of the Liberals had grown so
strong that on returning from the Whitsun recess he crossed the
floor to sit as a member of the Liberal Party. As a Liberal he
continued to campaign for free trade. The winnable seat of
Manchester North West was found for him for the 1906 general
election which he won.

From 1903 until 1905 Churchill was also
engaged in writing Lord Randolph Churchill, a two-volume
biography of his father which came out in 1906 and was received
as a masterpiece. However, filial devotion caused him to soften
some of his father's less attractive aspects.
 

Ministerial
office

When the Liberals took office, with Henry
Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister, in December 1905 Churchill
became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. Serving under
the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Victor Bruce, 9th Earl
of Elgin, Churchill dealt with the adoption of constitutions for
the defeated Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange River
Colony and with the issue of 'Chinese slavery' in South African
mines. He also became a prominent spokesman on free trade.
Churchill soon became the most prominent member of the Government
outside the Cabinet, and when Campbell-Bannerman was succeeded by
Herbert Henry Asquith in 1908, it came as little surprise when
Churchill was promoted to the Cabinet as President of the Board
of Trade. Under the law at the time, a newly appointed Cabinet
Minister was obliged to seek re-election at a by-election.
Churchill lost his Manchester seat to the Conservative William
Joynson-Hicks but was soon elected in another by-election at
Dundee constituency. As President of the Board of Trade he
pursued radical social reforms in conjunction with David Lloyd
George, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer.

In 1910 Churchill was promoted to Home
Secretary, where he was to prove somewhat controversial. A famous
photograph from the time shows the impetuous Churchill taking
personal charge of the January 1911 Sidney Street Siege, peering
around a corner to view a gun battle between cornered anarchists
and Scots Guards. His role attracted much criticism. The building
under siege caught fire. Churchill denied the fire brigade
access, forcing the criminals to choose surrender or death.
Arthur Balfour asked, "He [Churchill] and a photographer were
both risking valuable lives. I understand what the photographer
was doing but what was the Right Honourable gentleman
doing?"

1910 also saw Churchill preventing the army
being used to deal with a dispute at the Cambrian Colliery mine
in Tonypandy. Initially Churchill blocked the use of troops
fearing a repeat of the 1887 'bloody sunday' in Trafalgar Square.
Nevertheless troops were deployed to protect the mines and to
avoid riots when thirteen strikers were tried for minor offences,
an action that broke the tradition of not involving the military
in civil affairs and led to lingering dislike for Churchill in
Wales.

In 1911, Churchill became First Lord of the
Admiralty, a post he would hold into the First World War. He gave
impetus to military reform efforts, including development of
naval aviation, tanks, and the switch in fuel from coal to oil, a
massive engineering task, also reliant on securing Mesopotamia's
oil rights, bought circa 1907 through the secret service using
the Royal Burmah Oil Company as a front company.

The development of the battle tank was
financed from naval research funds via the Landships Committee,
and, although a decade later development of the battle tank would
be seen as a stroke of genius, at the time it was seen as
misappropriation of funds. The tank was deployed too early and in
too few numbers, much to Churchill's annoyance. He wanted a fleet
of tanks used to surprise the Germans under cover of smoke, and
to open a large section of the trenches by crushing barbed wire
and creating a breakthrough sector.

In 1915 Churchill was one of the political
and military engineers of the disastrous Gallipoli landings on
the Dardanelles during World War I. Churchill took much of the
blame for the fiasco, and when Prime Minister Asquith formed an
all-party coalition government, the Conservatives demanded
Churchill's demotion as the price for entry. For several months
Churchill served in the sinecure of Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster, before resigning from the government feeling his
energies were not being used. He rejoined the army, though
remaining an MP, and served for several months on the Western
Front. During this period his second in command was a young
Archibald Sinclair who would later lead the Liberal
Party.

Churchill's
Return to power

In December 1916, Asquith resigned as Prime
Minister and was replaced by Lloyd George. The time was thought
not yet right to risk the Conservatives' wrath by bringing
Churchill back into government. However, in July 1917 Churchill
was appointed Minister of Munitions. He was the main architect of
the Ten Year Rule, but the major preoccupation of his tenure in
the War Office was the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil
War. Churchill was a staunch advocate of foreign intervention,
declaring that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle". He
secured from a divided and loosely organised Cabinet
intensification and prolongation of the British involvement
beyond the wishes of any major group in Parliament or the nation
— and in the face of the bitter hostility of Labour. In
1920, after the last British forces had been withdrawn, Churchill
was instrumental in having arms sent to the Poles when they
invaded Ukraine. He became Secretary of State for the Colonies in
1921 and was a signatory of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which
established the Irish Free State.

Career between
the wars

In October 1922, Churchill underwent an
operation to remove his appendix. Upon his return, he learned
that the government had fallen and a General Election was
looming. The Liberal Party was now beset by internal division and
Churchill's campaign was weak. He lost his seat at Dundee to
prohibitionist, Edwin Scrymgeour, quipping that he had lost his
ministerial office, his seat and his appendix all at once.
Churchill stood for the Liberals again in the 1923 general
election, losing in Leicester, but over the next few months he
moved towards the Conservative Party, though initially using the
labels "Anti-Socialist" and "Constitutionalist". Less than one
year later, in the General Election of 1924, he was elected to
represent Epping as a "Constitutionalist" with Conservative
backing (a statue in his honour in Woodford Green was erected
when Woodford Green was part of the Epping constituency). The
following year he formally rejoined the Conservative Party,
commenting wryly that "Anyone can rat [change parties], but it
takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat."

He was appointed Chancellor of the
Exchequer in 1924 under Stanley Baldwin and oversaw the United
Kingdom's disastrous return to the Gold Standard, which resulted
in deflation, unemployment, and the miners' strike that led to
the General Strike of 1926. This decision prompted the economist
John Maynard Keynes to write The Economic Consequences of Mr.
Churchill, correctly arguing that the return to the gold standard
would lead to a world depression. Churchill later regarded this
as one of the worst decisions of his life. To be fair, it must be
noted that he was not an economist and that he acted on the
advice of the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman (of
whom Keynes said, "Always so charming, always so
wrong.")

During the General Strike of 1926,
Churchill was reported to have suggested that machine guns be
used on the striking miners. Churchill edited the Government's
newspaper, the British Gazette, and during the dispute he argued
that "either the country will break the General Strike, or the
General Strike will break the country." Furthermore, he
controversially claimed that the Fascism of Benito Mussolini had
"rendered a service to the whole world," showing, as it had, "a
way to combat subversive forces" — that is, he considered
the regime to be a bulwark against the perceived threat of
Communist revolution. At one point, Churchill went as far as to
call Mussolini the "Roman genius … the greatest lawgiver among
men."

The Conservative government was defeated in
the 1929 General Election. In the next two years, Churchill
became estranged from the Conservative leadership over the issues
of protective tariffs and Indian Home Rule, which he bitterly
opposed. He denigrated the father of the Indian independence
movement, Mahatma Gandhi, as "a half-naked fakir" who "ought to
be laid, bound hand and foot, at the gates of Delhi and then
trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated
on its back". When Ramsay MacDonald formed the National
Government in 1931, Churchill was not invited to join the
Cabinet. He was now at the lowest point in his career, in a
period known as "the wilderness years". He spent much of the next
few years concentrating on his writing, including Marlborough:
His Life and Times — a biography of his ancestor John
Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough — and A History of the
English Speaking Peoples (which was not published until well
after WWII). He became most notable for his outspoken opposition
towards the granting of independence to India (see Simon
Commission and Government of India Act 1935).

Soon, though, his attention was drawn to
the rise of Adolf Hitler and the dangers of Germany's rearmament.
For a time he was a lone voice calling on Britain to strengthen
itself to counter the belligerence of Germany. [2] Churchill was
a fierce critic of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler,
leading the wing of the Conservative Party that opposed the
Munich Agreement which Chamberlain famously declared to mean
"peace in our time". [3] He was also an outspoken supporter of
King Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis, leading to some
speculation that he might be appointed Prime Minister if the King
refused to take Baldwin's advice and consequently the government
resigned. However, this did not happen, and Churchill found
himself politically isolated and bruised for some time after
this.

Role as wartime
Prime Minister

At the outbreak of the Second World War
Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, just as he
was in the first part of the First World War. According to myth,
the Navy sent out: "Winston's back!"

In this job he proved to be one of the
highest-profile ministers during the so-called "Phony War", when
the only noticeable action was at sea. Churchill advocated the
pre-emptive occupation of the neutral Norwegian iron-ore port of
Narvik and the iron mines in Kiruna, Sweden, early in the War.
However, Chamberlain and the rest of the War Cabinet disagreed,
and the operation was delayed until the German invasion of
Norway, which was successful despite British efforts.

On 10 May 1940, hours before the German
invasion of France by a surprising lightning advance through the
Low Countries, it became clear that, following failure in Norway
and general incompetence, the country had no confidence in
Chamberlain's prosecution of the war and so Chamberlain resigned.
The commonly accepted version of events states that Lord Halifax
turned down the post of Prime Minister because he believed he
could not govern effectively as a member of the House of Lords
instead of the House of Commons. Although traditionally the Prime
Minister does not advise the King on the former's successor,
Chamberlain wanted someone who would command the support of all
three major parties in the House of Commons. A meeting with the
other two party leaders led to the recommendation of Churchill,
and as a constitutional monarch, George VI asked Churchill to be
Prime Minister and to form an all-party government. Churchill,
breaking with tradition, did not send Chamberlain a message
expressing regret over his resignation.

One author has alleged that that the King
favoured the appointment of Halifax, fearing that his own reign
would not survive the war, and thought that Halifax would
negotiate a settlement with Hitler to allow Britain to stay out
of the war, so preserving the monarchy.

Churchill's greatest achievement was that
he refused to capitulate when defeat by Germany was a strong
possibility and he remained a strong opponent of any negotiations
with Germany. Few others in the Cabinet had this degree of
resolve. By adopting this policy Churchill maintained the United
Kingdom as a base from which the Allies would eventually attack
Germany, thereby ensuring that the Soviet sphere of influence did
not also extend over Western Europe at the end of the
war.

In response to previous criticisms that
there had been no clear single minister in charge of the
prosecution of the war, Churchill created and took the additional
position of Minister of Defence. He immediately put his friend
and confidant, the industrialist and newspaper baron Lord
Beaverbrook, in charge of aircraft production. It was
Beaverbrook's astounding business acumen that allowed Britain to
quickly gear up aircraft production and engineering that
eventually made the difference in the war.

Churchill's speeches were a great
inspiration to the embattled United Kingdom. His first speech as
Prime Minister was the famous "I have nothing to offer but blood,
toil, tears, and sweat" speech. He followed that closely with two
other equally famous ones, given just before the Battle of
Britain. One included the immortal line, "We shall defend our
island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the
fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall
never surrender." The other included the equally famous "Let us
therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves
that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a
thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'
" At the height of the Battle of Britain, his bracing survey of
the situation included the memorable line "Never in the field of
human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few", which
engendered the enduring nickname "The Few" for the Allied fighter
pilots who won it. One of his most memorable war speeches came on
November 10th 1942 at the Lord Mayor's Luncheon at Mansion House
in London. That day, word had come that American and British
troops had surrounded the port of Casablanca in Africa. As most
people were saying it was the beginning of the end, Churchill
famously said

"This is not the end. It is not even the
beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the
beginning"

His good relationship with Franklin D.
Roosevelt secured the United Kingdom vital supplies via the North
Atlantic Ocean shipping routes. It was for this reason that
Churchill was relieved when Roosevelt was re-elected. Upon
re-election, Roosevelt immediately set about implementing a new
method of not only providing military hardware to Britain without
the need for monetary payment, but also of providing, free of
fiscal charge, much of the shipping that transported the
supplies. Put simply, Roosevelt persuaded Congress that repayment
for this immensely costly service would take the form of
defending the USA; and so Lend-lease was born. Churchill had 12
strategic conferences with Roosevelt which covered the Atlantic
Charter, Europe first strategy, the Declaration by the United
Nations and other war policies. Churchill initiated the Special
Operations Executive (SOE) under Hugh Dalton's Ministry of
Economic Warfare, which established, conducted and fostered
covert, subversive and partisan operations in occupied
territories with notable success; and also the Commandos which
established the pattern for most of the world's current Special
Forces. The Russians referred to him as the "British
Bulldog".

Churchill's health suffered, as shown by a
mild heart attack he suffered in December 1941 at the White House
and also in December 1943 when he contracted
pneumonia.

Churchill supported the bombing of Dresden
shortly before the end of the war; many including Churchill, who
wrote about it on 28th March 1945, have since maintained that the
city was primarily a civilian target with little military
value[citation needed]. However, the bombing was seen at the time
as being helpful to the Soviet allies, and the perspective of the
British who had lived through the Blitz on London has to be taken
into account (who considered that the destruction of cities was
both just retribution for German attacks on British cities, and
also a lesson to Germany never to go to war again).

Churchill was party to treaties that would
redraw post-WWII European and Asian boundaries. These were
discussed as early as 1943. Proposals for European boundaries and
settlements were officially agreed to by Harry S. Truman,
Churchill, and Stalin at Potsdam. At the second Quebec Conference
in 1944 he drafted and together with U.S. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt signed a toned down version of the original Morgenthau
Plan, where they pledged to convert Germany after her
unconditional surrender "into a country primarily agricultural
and pastoral in its character."

The settlement concerning the borders of
Poland, i.e. the boundary between Poland and the Soviet Union and
between Germany and Poland, was viewed as a betrayal in Poland
during the post-war years, as it was established against the
views of the Polish government in exile. Churchill was convinced
that the only way to alleviate tensions between the two
populations was the transfer of people, to match the national
borders. As he expounded in the House of Commons in 1944,
"Expulsion is the method which, insofar as we have been able to
see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no
mixture of populations to cause endless trouble… A clean sweep
will be made. I am not alarmed by these transferences, which are
more possible in modern conditions." However the resulting
expulsions of Germans was carried out by the Soviet Union in a
way which resulted in much hardship and, according to amongst
others a 1966 report by the West German Ministry of Refugees and
Displaced Persons, the death of over 2,100,000. Churchill opposed
the effective annexation of Poland by the Soviet Union and wrote
bitterly about it in his books, but he was unable to prevent it
at the conferences.

On 9 October 1944, he and Eden were in
Moscow, and that night they met Stalin in the Kremlin, without
the Americans. Bargaining went on throughout the night. Churchill
wrote on a scrap of paper that Stalin had a 90 percent "interest"
in Romania, Britain a 90 percent "interest" in Greece, both
Russia and Britain a 50 percent interest in Yugoslavia. When they
got to Italy, Stalin ceded that country to Churchill. The crucial
questions arose when the Ministers of Foreign Affairs discussed
"percentages" in Eastern Europe. Molotov's proposals were that
Russia should have a 75 percent interest in Hungary, 75 percent
in Bulgaria, and 60 percent in Yugoslavia. This was Stalin's
price for ceding Italy and Greece. Eden tried to haggle: Hungary
75/25, Bulgaria 80/20, but Yugoslavia 50/50. After lengthy
bargaining they settled on an 80/20 division of interest between
Russia and Britain in Bulgaria and Hungary, and a 50/50 division
in Yugoslavia. U.S. Ambassador Harriman was informed only after
the bargain was struck. This gentleman's agreement was sealed
with a handshake.

After World War
II

Although the importance of Churchill's role
in World War II was undeniable, he had many enemies in his own
country. His expressed contempt for a number of popular ideas, in
particular public health care and better education for the
majority of the population, produced much dissatisfaction amongst
the population, particularly those who had fought in the war.
Immediately following the close of the war in Europe, Churchill
was heavily defeated in the 1945 election by Clement Attlee and
the Labour Party. [7] Some historians think that many British
voters believed that the man who had led the nation so well in
war was not the best man to lead it in peace. Others see the
election result as a reaction not against Churchill personally,
but against the Conservative Party's record in the 1930s under
Baldwin and Chamberlain.

Winston Churchill was an early supporter of
the pan-Europeanism that eventually led to the formation of the
European Common Market and later the European Union (for which
one of the three main buildings of the European Parliament is
named in his honour). Churchill was also instrumental in giving
France a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council
(which provided another European power to counterbalance the
Soviet Union's permanent seat). Churchill also occasionally made
comments supportive of world government. For instance, he once
said:

Unless some effective world supergovernment
for the purpose of preventing war can be set up… the
prospects for peace and human progress are dark…
If… it is found possible to build a world organization of
irresistible force and inviolable authority for the purpose of
securing peace, there are no limits to the blessings which all
men enjoy and share.

At the beginning of the Cold War, he
famously popularised the term: the "Iron Curtain", which had been
used before by Nazi leaders Hitler and Goebbels. The term entered
the public consciousness after a 1946 speech at Westminster
College in Fulton, Missouri, when Churchill, a guest of Harry S
Truman, famously declared:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in
the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.
Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of
Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna,
Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities
and the populations around them lie in what I must call the
Soviet sphere.

Second
term

Churchill was restless and bored as leader
of the Conservative opposition in the immediate post-war years.
After Labour's defeat in the General Election of 1951, Churchill
again became Prime Minister. His third government — after
the wartime national government and the brief caretaker
government of 1945 — would last until his resignation in
1955. During this period he renewed what he called the "special
relationship" between Britain and the United States, and engaged
himself in the formation of the post-war order.

His domestic priorities were, however,
overshadowed by a series of foreign policy crises, which were
partly the result of the continued decline of British military
and imperial prestige and power. Being a strong proponent of
Britain as an international power, Churchill would often meet
such moments with direct action.

The Mau Mau
Rebellion

In 1951, grievances against the colonial
distribution of land came to a head with the Kenya Africa Union
demanding greater representation and land reform. When these
demands were rejected, more radical elements came forward,
launching the Mau Mau rebellion in 1952. On 17 August 1952, a
state of emergency was declared, and British troops were flown to
Kenya to deal with the rebellion. As both sides increased the
ferocity of their attacks, the country moved to full-scale civil
war.

In 1953, the Lari massacre, perpetrated by
Mau-Mau insurgents against Kikuyu loyal to the British, changed
the political complexion of the rebellion and gave the
public-relations advantage to the British. Churchill's strategy
was to use a military stick combined with implementing many of
the concessions that Attlee's government had blocked in 1951. He
ordered an increased military presence and appointed General Sir
George Erskine, who would implement Operation Anvil in 1954 that
broke the back of the rebellion in the city of Nairobi. Operation
Hammer, in turn, was designed to root out rebels in the
countryside. Churchill ordered peace talks opened, but these
collapsed shortly after his leaving office.

Malayan
Emergency

In Malaya, a rebellion against British rule
had been in progress since 1948. Once again, Churchill's
government inherited a crisis, and once again Churchill chose to
use direct military action against those in rebellion while
attempting to build an alliance with those who were not. He
stepped up the implementation of a "hearts and minds" campaign
and approved the creation of fortified villages, a tactic that
would become a recurring part of Western military strategy in
Southeast Asia.

The Malayan Emergency was a more direct
case of a guerrilla movement, centred in an ethnic group, but
backed by the Soviet Union. As such, Britain's policy of direct
confrontation and military victory had a great deal more support
than in Iran or in Kenya. At the highpoint of the conflict, over
35,500 British troops were stationed in Malaya. As the rebellion
lost ground, it began to lose favour with the local
population.

While the rebellion was slowly being
defeated, it was equally clear that colonial rule from Britain
was no longer plausible. In 1953, plans were drawn up for
independence for Singapore and the other crown colonies in the
region. The first elections were held in 1955, just days before
Churchill's own resignation, and in 1957, under Prime Minister
Anthony Eden, Malaya became independent.

Honours

From 1941 to his death, he was the Lord
Warden of the Cinque Ports, a ceremonial office. In 1941 Canadian
Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King swore him into the
Queen's Privy Council for Canada. Although this allowed him to
use the honorific title "The Honourable" and the post-nominal
letters "P.C." both of these were trumped by his membership in
the Imperial Privy Council which allowed him the use of The Right
Honourable.

In 1953 he was awarded two major honours:
he was invested as a Knight of the Garter (becoming Sir Winston
Churchill, KG) and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
"for his mastery of historical and biographical description as
well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human
values".

A stroke in June of that year led to him
being paralysed down his left side. He retired as Prime Minister
on 5 April 1955 because of his health but retained his post as
Chancellor of the University of Bristol, and remained a member of
parliament until 1964. In 1959 he became Father of the House, the
MP with the longest continuous service.

In 1955, after retiring as Prime Minister,
Churchill was offered elevation to the peerage in the rank of
duke. He considered the offer, and even chose the name "Duke of
London". However, he then declined the title after being
persuaded by his son Randolph not to accept it. Since then, only
British royals have been made dukes.

In 1956 Churchill received the Karlspreis
(known in English as the Charlemagne Award), an award by the
German city of Aachen to those who most contribute to the
European idea and European peace.

In 1960, Churchill College, Cambridge was
established as the national and Commonwealth memorial to
Churchill.

In 1963, he became the first person to
become an Honorary Citizen of the United States.

Churchill is the tenth most admired person
in the 20th century, according to Gallup.

Four schools in Canada, one in Vancouver,
one in Hamilton, one in St. Catharines and one in Calgary were
named in his honour.

Family and
Personal Life

On 12 September 1908 at the socially
desirable St. Margaret's, Westminster, Churchill married
Clementine Hozier, a dazzling but largely penniless beauty whom
he met at a dinner party that March (he had proposed to actress
Ethel Barrymore but was turned down). They had five children:
Diana; Randolph; Sarah, who co-starred with Fred Astaire in Royal
Wedding; Marigold, who died in early childhood; and Mary, who has
written a book about her parents. Churchill's son Randolph and
his grandsons Nicholas Soames and Winston all followed him into
Parliament. The daughters tended to marry politicians and support
their careers. Some of the siblings wrote serious
books.

Clementine's mother was Lady Blanche
Henrietta Ogilvy, second wife of Sir Henry Montague Hozier and a
daughter of the 7th Earl of Airlie. Clementine's paternity,
however, is open to debate. Lady Blanche was well known for
sharing her favours and was eventually divorced as a result. She
maintained that Clementine's father was Capt. William George
"Bay" Middleton, a noted horseman. But Clementine's biographer
Joan Hardwick has surmised, due to Sir Henry Hozier's reputed
sterility, that all Lady Blanche's "Hozier" children were
actually fathered by her sister's husband, Algernon Bertram
Freeman-Mitford, better known as a grandfather of the infamous
Mitford sisters of the 1920s.

When not in London on government business,
Churchill usually lived at his beloved Chartwell House in Kent,
two miles south of Westerham. He and his wife bought the house in
1922 and lived there until his death in 1965. During his
Chartwell stays, he enjoyed writing as well as painting,
bricklaying, and admiring the estate's famous black
swans.

For much of his life, Churchill battled
with depression, which he called his black dog.

Aware that he was slowing down both
physically and mentally, Churchill retired as Prime Minister in
1955 and was succeeded by Anthony Eden, who had long been his
ambitious protégé. (Three years earlier, Eden had
married Churchill's niece, Anne Clarissa Spencer-Churchill, his
second marriage.) Churchill spent most of his retirement at
Chartwell and in the south of France.

In 1963 U.S. President John F. Kennedy
named Churchill the first Honorary Citizen of the United States.
Churchill was too ill to attend the White House ceremony, so his
son and grandson accepted the award for him.

On 15 January 1965, Churchill suffered
another stroke — a severe cerebral thrombosis — that
left him gravely ill. He died nine days later, aged 90, on 24
January 1965, 70 years to the day after his father's
death.

By decree of the Queen, his body lay in
State in Westminster Hall for three days and a state funeral
service was held at St Paul's Cathedral. [8] This was the first
state funeral for a non-royal family member since that of Field
Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar in 1914.

As his coffin passed down the Thames on the
Havengore, the cranes of London's docklands bowed in salute. The
Royal Artillery fired a 19-gun salute (as head of government),
and the RAF staged a fly-by of sixteen English Electric Lightning
fighters. The state funeral was the largest gathering of
dignitaries in Britain as representatives from over 100 countries
attended, including French President Charles de Gaulle, Canadian
Prime Minister Lester Pearson, Prime Minister of Rhodesia Ian
Smith, other heads of state and government, and members of
royalty. It also saw the largest assemblage of statesmen in the
world until the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005.

It has been suggested it was Churchill's
wish that, were de Gaulle to outlive him, his (Churchill's)
funeral procession should pass through Waterloo Station. This is
complete myth. Though President de Gaulle did attend the service
and the coffin departed for Bladon from Waterloo Station, there
is absolutely no connection. In fact, Churchill did not plan his
own funeral as commonly believed; he made a few suggestions, but
there was a private committee which made the plans, and he was
not on it.

At Churchill's request, he was buried in
the family plot at St Martin Church, Bladon, near Woodstock, not
far from his birthplace at Blenheim.

Because the funeral took place on 30
January, people in the United States marked it by paying tribute
to his friendship with Roosevelt because it was the anniversary
of FDR's birth. The tributes were led by Roosevelt's
children.

On 9 February 1965, Churchill's estate was
probated at 304,044 pounds sterling (equivalent to about
£3.8m in 2004).

One of four specially made sets of false
teeth, designed to retain Churchill's distinctive style of
speech, which Churchill wore throughout his life is now kept in
the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of
England.

References


http://www.biographyonline.net/politicians/winston_churchill.html


http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/117269/Sir-Winston-Churchill


http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=es&langpair=en%7Ces&u=http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1953/churchill-bio.html

Author: (Latin American
Historian)

Monografias.com

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