Sir Winston Churchill
Conservative Party
Image credit: Winston Churchill (The Roaring Lion), Yousaf Karsch, 30 December 1941. Library and Archives Canada (Accession number MIKAN 3915740)/CC by 2.0
Sir Winston Churchill
…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.
Conservative Party
May 1940 - July 1945
10 May 1940 - 26 Jul 1945
|October 1951 - April 1955
|29 Oct 1951 - 5 Apr 1955

Image credit: Winston Churchill (The Roaring Lion), Yousaf Karsch, 30 December 1941. Library and Archives Canada (Accession number MIKAN 3915740)/CC by 2.0
Key Facts
Tenure dates
10 May 1940 - 26 Jul 1945
29 Oct 1951 - 5 Apr 1955
Length of tenures
8 years, 239 days
Party
Conservative Party
Spouse
Clementine Hozier
Born
30 Nov 1874
Birth place
Blenheim, Oxfordshire, England
Died
24 Jan 1965 (aged 90 years)
Resting place
St Martin’s Church, Bladon, Oxfordshire
About Sir Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill became Prime Minister at Britain’s darkest hour. He articulated the will to fight on and achieve victory, in the face of what seemed, in the spring of 1940 to be unlikely odds. He remained as Prime Minister until 1945 and, after an unlikely election defeat that year, returned to the premiership during the early 1950s. For his inspirational war leadership alone, many consider him one of the greatest prime ministers.
Winston Churchill was born in 1874 in Blenheim Palace. He was the scion of the illustrious Marlborough family, son of Lord Randolph Churchill and his American wife Jennie.
He was educated at Harrow, without much distinguishing success, and then proceeded to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst for officer training. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1895. After that, he observed the Cuban Independence War, and then served in India, the North West Frontier, and Sudan. He participated in the cavalry charge of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. It was at this time that he wrote books about his military experiences, which were published.
He tried and failed to win an 1899 by-election in Oldham. After that, anticipating the likely outbreak of war, he set off to South Africa as a correspondent for the Morning Post. During the war, he was captured by Boer soldiers, and held as a POW, before escaping. In 1900, he rejoined the army to participate in the relief of Ladysmith. In October that year, he was elected as MP for Oldham as a Conservative.
However, Churchill began to feel alienated from the Conservatives over the issue of free trade. In 1904 he ‘crossed the floor’ to the Liberals. In the 1906 election, Churchill won the Manchester North West seat and was promoted to Under-Secretary of State for the Colonial Office. When Asquith became Prime Minister in 1908, Churchill was promoted to the President of the Board of Trade (though he initially lost the byelection required on becoming a minister, the Liberals found him a safe seat in Dundee). He played a leading role in the Liberal government, and received another promotion, to Home Secretary, in 1910.
In 1911, Asquith moved Churchill to the Admiralty. It was in this position that Churchill oversaw Britain’s naval preparedness, and he played a key role in the 1914 July Crisis. During the First World War, he was one of the key architects of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in 1915. He resigned from government, and briefly fought in the trenches of the Western Front in 1916, returning to Westminster in the middle of that year.
In July 1917, Churchill returned to government as Minister of Munitions. When the war ended, he played a key role in British foreign policy after the First World War. He would remain in the coalition government until the fall of Lloyd George in late 1922. In the election of that year, he lost his Dundee seat.
Defeated again in 1923, he devoted his time to writing. In 1924, accepting the inevitable, Churchill defected once again, back to the Conservatives. In the October election, he won the Epping seat, and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin promoted him to Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He held the position for five years, controversially restoring the gold standard in 1925.
In 1929, the Conservatives were defeated in the election and in 1931 Churchill resigned from the Shadow Cabinet over its support for dominion status for India. The 1930s would be Churchill’s ‘Wilderness Years’, as his outspoken views on Indian self government, the abdication crisis, and, above all, the threat of Nazi Germany, put him at odds with Prime Ministers Baldwin and Chamberlain.
When war came again in 1939, Chamberlain sought to buttress his government by making Churchill First Lord of the Admiralty. With the collapse of Chamberlain’s authority in May 1940, the Conservative Party grandees asked Churchill to become Prime Minister.
During the spring and summer of 1940, Churchill rallied the nation, delivering speeches and articulating the determination to fight on and defeat Nazi Germany, despite the threat of invasion and the defeat of Britain’s allies. In the Battle of Britain, the RAF defeated the German air force and the threat of invasion receded.
The years that followed would be difficult, but after the USSR and USA joined the war in 1941, he played a key role in the Allied cause, flying across the world to meet his fellow leaders. But, power was moving towards the USA and USSR. Over the rest of the war, Churchill’s importance steadily weakened.
In 1945, the Conservatives were defeated in the general election, and Churchill decided to continue as Leader of the Opposition.
He returned to power in 1951. His second premiership played an important role in imprinting the post-war consensus. However, his wider hopes for a rapprochement in the Cold War, and even a return of British power, proved far too optimistic. He suffered from ill health for long periods.
Churchill left power in 1955 though he remained in the House of Commons. He died in January 1965 and received a state funeral.
Churchill was a divisive figure in his lifetime and has been a controversial figure in the years that have followed. He was a man of the late 19th Century, who lived through both the high point and the twilight of the British Empire. But, in the chaos and disaster of May 1940, it fell to Churchill to rally the nation to fight on. For many, this makes him Britain’s greatest Prime Minister.
Premiership
During the early evening of 10 May 1940, Winston Churchill met King George VI and accepted his offer to become Prime Minister. That morning, German forces had invaded France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Within days, the outlook worsened further still as the French military was heavily defeated and collapsed in the face of the German advance. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) withdrew to the port of Dunkirk and awaited rescue. Churchill’s advisers told him that only a few tens of thousands of the 300,000 now trapped might be rescued.
He immediately consulted Labour leader Clement Attlee in order to form a wartime coalition government. Labour figures including Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison, and Arthur Greenwood entered cabinet, as did Liberal leader Archibald Sinclair. In the early days of Churchill’s premiership, he was more popular with Labour and Liberal MPs, whereas Conservatives were more suspicious of the maverick Churchill and unhappy with the ousting of Chamberlain.
For several days in late May 1940, Churchill discussed the possibility of ending the war with the War Cabinet. Lord Halifax suggested asking Italy for mediation. Ultimately, after surveying the opinions of the Outer Cabinet, which seemed determined, Churchill’s view that the war should continue prevailed.
Within days, it became clear that a large part of the BEF had been evacuated. But France could not be saved. In mid-June the French government negotiated an armistice with Hitler. On 3 July, Churchill ordered that the Royal Navy destroy a part of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, to prevent it falling into German hands. It was a ruthless act that killed over a thousand French sailors, but one that proved to the world that Britain would fight on.
Over the summer of 1940, Churchill’s speeches rallied the nation to defiance. German forces massed in Northern France, and it seemed possible that they would attempt to invade. For several months, the German air force tried to seize control of Britain’s skies, bombing strategic targets and then Britain’s cities.
That summer, under Churchill’s leadership, Britain steadily transformed into a total war economy, mobilising the population for the enormous struggle. Churchill was energetic, galvanising the war effort and writing innumerable memoranda titled ‘Action This Day’ on a vast number of topics. As Minister of War, he involved himself in almost every aspect of decision making.
In 1941, the news remained bleak. British forces were repeatedly beaten by the German army, and another war broke out in December when Japanese forces took advantage of British weakness and swiftly conquered Malaya and Burma. German submarines sank millions of tons of Allied shipping in the Atlantic. But, that year, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, bringing the British a powerful new ally. In December, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, bringing the US into the war.
Meanwhile, Churchill established strong relations with American President Franklin Roosevelt. With the Americans and Soviets having joined the war, Churchill would conduct frequent diplomacy, travelling tens of thousands of miles to summits and meetings, helping to keep the Allied coalition together.

From late 1942, the military tide began to turn as the Allies defeated the submarine menace, and then won battles in North Africa and on the Eastern Front. From 1943, British forces advanced in first Sicily, and then Italy. In June 1944, Allied forces invaded France, and by September they had reached the German border. Meanwhile, a devastating and controversial Allied air campaign steadily destroyed German cities. From November 1944, the British began a counterattack in Burma that swept away all of Japan’s early war gains. After months of bitter fighting, Germany surrendered in May 1945, and in July 1945 Churchill attended the Potsdam Conference in Berlin.
It was there that he learned that he had been defeated in the 1945 election. In May, Attlee had told him that the wartime coalition must end, and Churchill reconstituted his ministry into a mostly-Conservative government. Though he remained personally popular, the Conservatives were widely blamed for interwar policy failures and many people were inspired by Labour’s optimistic manifesto. Churchill also made a series of mistakes, including the absurd suggestion that a Labour government would form a ‘Gestapo’ to deal with opposition.
Churchill returned to power in 1951 at the age of 76. Though he was tired by this point, and suffered several bouts of ill health, the government had a few bright spots. Many of the firms unnecessarily nationalised by his predecessor were privatised, Britain’s involvement in the Korean War ended, and Britain became a nuclear power. More broadly, he reconciled the Conservatives to the Post-War Consensus. Notably, he was also the first of Queen Elizabeth II’s Prime Ministers.
Churchill also engaged in a great round of diplomacy – in an effort to end the Cold War after Stalin’s death in 1953. But, Britain was not the great power it had been in Churchill’s youth, and his efforts faltered. He retired in 1955.
Parliament
Churchill fought 21 elections and by-elections between 1899 and 1959 (for Oldham, Manchester North West, Dundee, Leicester West, Westminster Abbey, Epping, and Woodford). He lost five of them. Ultimately, he represented Oldham, Manchester North West, Dundee, Epping, and Woodford during his long career.
Churchill excelled as an orator, and some of his wartime speeches (including ‘Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat’, ‘We Shall Fight them on the Beaches’, and ‘War of the Unknown Warriors’) are considered some of the greatest in British history.
As a Commons leader, Churchill was often less successful against the taciturn and unflappable Clement Attlee, who tended to have a better grasp of detail, using it to parry Churchill’s attacks.
Personal life
Churchill married Clementine Hozier on 12 September 1908 at St Margaret’s, Westminster. Churchill and Clementine were married for over 56 years until his death. The success of his marriage was important to Churchill’s career as Clementine’s unbroken affection provided him with a secure and happy background. They had five children. Two of their children predeceased their parents: Marigold who died aged 3 in 1921, and Diana who died aged 54 in 1963.
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