Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) The Right Honourable Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill , the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and an American mother, was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst. After a brief but eventful career in the army, he became a Conservative Member of Parliament in 1900. He held many high posts in Liberal and Conservative governments during the first three decades of the century. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty - a post which he had earlier held from 1911 to 1915. In May, 1940, he became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence and remained in office until 1945. He took over the premiership again in the Conservative victory of 1951 and resigned in 1955. However, he remained a Member of Parliament until the general election of 1964, when he did not seek re-election. Queen Elizabeth II conferred on Churchill the dignity of Knighthood and invested him with the insignia of the Order of the Garter in 1953. Among the other countless honours and decorations he received, special mention should be made of the honorary citizenship of the United States which President Kennedy conferred on him in 1963. Early life Winston Churchill was born on 30 November 1874 into the aristocratic Spencer-Churchill family of the noble Dukes of Marlborough, but his mother was born in America. After enjoying a privileged childhood, Churchill began his education in 1888 at Harrow, a top London boys’ school. He did not prove to be an outstanding student and school was not therefore something he enjoyed. On finishing school in 1893, it took him three attempts to pass the entry exam for Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy. But after graduation he began a military career that, over the next five years, saw him fight battles on three continents, win four medals and an Order of Merit, write five books and win a seat in Parliament, all before his 26th birthday. Political career While serving in the British army, Churchill was also a newspaper correspondent. Whilst reporting on the Boer War in South Africa,he made headlines when he escaped from a prisoner of war camp there, returning to England in 1900 to embark on a political career. He was elected to Parliament and served in different Cabinets as Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty (Minister responsible for the navy). In 1915 he was forced to resign after the failure of a particular military campaign. He decided to join the army again and led the men of the 6th Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers in the trenches of France. When in 1917 a new government was formed he became Minister of Munitions. In the years leading up to 1929, Churchill held all of the most important ministerial posts except that of Foreign Minister. www.wondereurope.altervista.org Winston Churchill is forever remembered for his contributions as Prime Minister (PM) during World War II. On May 10, 1940, with the Germans attacking western Europe, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned and King George VI asked Churchill to become Prime Minister and form a government. Churchill formed a coalition with the Labour, Liberal and Conservative parties. He later wrote, "I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial." Developing the “Grand Alliance” with Russia and America, he became a symbol for victory among the oppressed and conquered peoples. In 1945, with the war in Europe over but the war with Japan still being fought, the Labour party defeated the Conservatives in an election. Churchill was no longer Prime Minister. However, he was easily reelected to his seat and became Leader of the Opposition. The War Leader Churchill's inspirational speeches when Britain had little else to fight with roused the nation and convinced his colleagues to fight on even after Hitler's armies had conquered France and dominated most of Western Europe. After the Soviet Union and the United States entered the war in 1941, he worked to build what he called a "Grand Alliance," traveling tens of thousands of miles to meet with alies and coordinate military strategy. With them he redrew the map of Europe as Germany collapsed in 1945. Almost immediately, he saw the threat that had arisen in Hitler's place, and warned the West of the Soviet "Iron Curtain" in his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. “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, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.” Churchill as artist, historian, and writer Winston Churchill was an accomplished artist and took great pleasure in painting, especially after his resignation as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915. He found a haven in art to overcome the spells of depression which he suffered throughout his life. As William Rees-Mogg has stated, "In his own life, he had to suffer the 'black dog' of depression. In his landscapes and still lives there is no sign of depression."Churchill was persuaded and taught to paint by his artist friend, Paul Maze, whom he met during the First World War. Maze was a great influence on Churchill's painting and became a lifelong painting companion. Churchill is best known for his impressionist scenes of landscape, many of which were painted while on holiday in the South of France, Egypt or Morocco.Using the pseudonym "Charles Morin", he continued his hobby throughout his life and painted hundreds of paintings, many of which are on show in the studio at Chartwell as well as private collections.Most of his paintings are oil-based and feature landscapes, but he also did a number of interior scenes and portraits. In 1925 Lord Duveen, Kenneth Clark, and Oswald www.wondereurope.altervista.org Birley selected his Winter Sunshine as the prize winner in a contest for anonymous amateur artists.Due to obvious time constraints, Churchill attempted only one painting during the Second World War. He completed the painting from the tower of the Villa Taylor in Marrakesh. Some of his paintings can today be seen in the Wendy and Emery Reves Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art. Emery Reves was Churchill's American publisher, as well as a close friend and Churchill often visited Emery and his wife at their villa, La Pausa, in the South of France, which had originally been built in 1927 for Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel by her lover Bendor, 2nd Duke of Westminster. The villa was rebuilt within the museum in 1985 with a gallery of Churchill paintings and memorabilia. Despite his lifelong fame and upper-class origins, Churchill always struggled to keep his income at a level which would fund his extravagant lifestyle. MPs before 1946 received only a nominal salary (and in fact did not receive anything at all until the Parliament Act 1911) so many had secondary professions from which to earn a living.From his first book in 1898 until his second stint as Prime Minister, Churchill's income was almost entirely made from writing books and opinion pieces for newspapers and magazines. The most famous of his newspaper articles are those that appeared in the Evening Standard from 1936 warning of the rise of Hitler and the danger of the policy of appeasement. Churchill was also a prolific writer of books, writing a novel, two biographies, three volumes of memoirs, and several histories in addition to his many newspaper articles. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values". Two of his most famous works, published after his first premiership brought his international fame to new heights, were his six-volume memoir The Second World War and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples ; a four-volume history covering the period from Caesar's invasions of Britain (55 BC) to the beginning of the First World War (1914). Churchill was also an amateur bricklayer, building buildings and garden walls at his country home at Chartwell, where he also bred butterflies. As part of this hobby Churchill joined theAmalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers, but was expelled because of his membership in the Conservative Party. He died at his London home at age 90, on the morning of Sunday 24 January 1965, 70 years to the day after his father's death. www.wondereurope.altervista.org .